Mea Culpa: a 17-century coffee house and an insoluble problem of punctuation

Apostrophe madness, truncated headlines and expat retirees in this week’s Independent

Edward Lloyd’s coffee shop, the origin of an apostrophal difficulty

We came across one of the insoluble problems of punctuation this week. How do you write the possessive form of Lloyd’s of London, the City insurance market that is moving part of its operations to the continent to prepare for Brexit?

We wanted to write “Lloyd’s’ announcement”, but that would look so odd as to be distracting.

The problem is that the name of the market is already a possessive, from a 17th-century coffee house (above) called Lloyd’s after its owner, Edward Lloyd. In an early version of our report we wrote “Lloyds’ announcement”, which is one way of dealing with it, but it feels arbitrary to drop one apostrophe and add another. It also risks confusion with Lloyds Bank.

The Independent’s style is to do the opposite, which is to keep the original apostrophe and not bother with the second, as in “Lloyd’s announcement”. If we cannot avoid it, we write “McDonald’s burgers” and “Sainsbury’s car parks”, and get away with it by pretending that the brand name is an adjective.

The style guide of The Economist, whose writers come across this problem more often, says: “Try to avoid using Lloyd’s as a possessive.” Wise advice. We rewrote the report to say, “The announcement from Lloyd’s.”

Who lost? When we make headlines shorter there is a risk of changing the meaning. This week a short headline on the front page read: “Trump tweet costs arms company $3.5bn.” At first sight, this looks like a reasonable version of the longer headline on the page: “Donald Trump knocks $3.5bn off Lockheed Martin market value with one tweet.” But if a share price goes down, although it reduces the value of the company, the company itself doesn’t lose the money.

So it would have been fine if the short headline had said, “Trump tweet wipes $3.5bn off arms company shares”. If the President-elect follows through on his threat to the F-35 fighter jet, the company may lose money, but not yet. In any case, as we said in the report, the share price bounced about halfway back later in the day.

Costa cutter or cuttee: We referred to expats in Spain as “British retirees on the costas” in an editorial, which a reader thought was confusing. He said that, on the model of employee and employer, the retirees in that sentence would be the costas, not the old people, just as an attendee at a Buckingham Palace garden party would be the Queen, the person who is being attended, rather than someone doing the attending.

However, as I have written before, the -ee ending is not always the “done to” form of a “do-er” word: refugee, for example, comes from French refugié, meaning “having fled”. Even so, retiree (and attendee) is an unnecessary word that should be avoided in any case. “Pensioners” would have served the purpose better.

Former patriots: On this occasion we managed not to hyphenate expats, which we did last week in a report of the Supreme Court Article 50 case. This was confusing because expat is a shortening of expatriates, which means people living outside their native country, whereas “ex-pat” may make it seem as if they used to be patriots but aren’t any more. That could be true but it is not what we mean.

Wipe-out: Thanks to John Northover who wrote to point out that we continue to use the word “existential”, despite my strictures. We mentioned “the Kurds’ existential enemies in Isis” in an editorial. By which I think we meant that Isis wants to wipe the Kurds out. As Isis is the existential enemy of anyone who isn’t Isis, however, it doesn’t add much. Plain “enemies” would have done.