Mea Culpa: in debt to Latin, or to American slang?

John Rentoul applies a spot of light pedantry to last week’s Independent

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of his security cabinet (AP)

We wrote on Thursday that Benjamin Netanyahu is “in political hoc to the Israeli far right”, which is not the usual spelling. It is odd that half of the Latin phrase ad hoc, meaning improvised, is more familiar to many people than “in hock”, originally US slang for “in debt”, let alone the older English hock, the heel joint in the hind leg of a horse, or even hock, Rhenish wine. This last is short for Hockamore, a “corrupt Englishing of German Hochheimer” from the 1620s, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

We meant that Netanyahu is influenced by the far right as if he had pawned his future to them. Anyway, thanks to Beryl Wall for pointing out our error with the comment: “Words offer light relief in rather unhappy times.” How true.

Corporate footprint: In an article about Mark Zuckerberg’s comment that the world needs more “masculine energy”, we asked: “Has he ever stepped foot inside a corporate office?” Julian Self wrote to insist that “the expression is, always has been and forever will be ‘set foot’ and no variation ought to be tolerated”.

As a good-natured and indulgent pedant, I wouldn’t go that far, but the variation from the normal phrase can be distracting and as it is not interesting, I agree that we should avoid it.

One step back: My colleague Liam James last week noted a small victory in the campaign against “amid” – the pointless phrase “amid health alerts” was cut from the end of a headline last weekend about the possibility of a UK temperature of -20C. But Linda Beeley, a reader, has emailed about a small defeat the next day: “Newsom says LA blaze is ‘worst natural disaster in US history’ amid criticism.” We needed to delete the last two words of that headline. The war on “amid” rages on.

When, who, and how many? A colleague described this as more like a cryptic crossword clue than a news headline: “‘Beloved’ lollipop lady, 49, killed after car crashes into mother-of-four with drink driver jailed.” It takes some work on the reader’s part to understand that the mother of four (which does not need hyphens) is the same person as the beloved lollipop lady. The “after” should be “when”; and then the “with” might as well be “amid” as it simply allows the occasion for the story – the sentencing of the driver – to be tacked on at the end.

In normal English this could be rendered: “Jail for drink driver who killed ‘beloved’ mother-of-four lollipop lady.” (In this case mother-of-four would be hyphenated because it is an adjectival phrase.) That doesn’t put the victim first, or give her age, but her age was not needed in the headline and at least it makes sense.

One word or two? Last weekend we briefly had this headline: “It’s time for Labour to crackdown on the scourge of e-scooters.” I think e-scooters will disappear soon enough because e-bikes will be more popular, but the headline should have had “crack down” as two words, because they are the verb form. The noun, “a crackdown”, is one word. I don’t really know why.

Over and under: We make this mistake so often, you would think our writers would have learned to avoid the rhetorical device. We said that the importance of Labour’s promise to deliver 1.5 million new homes over the course of the current parliament “cannot be understated”. We meant that it cannot be overstated, because its importance is so great, as Bernard Theobald pointed out.

If you want to test the phrase, invert it: “cannot be understated” means “can be overstated”. But better still, avoid.