Mea Culpa: Jack Draper’s Latin lesson

Today marks the end of an error for John Rentoul, who picks out the finer points of the English language in this week’s Independent

You’ll find plums growing at Morden Tube station on the Northern line... not so much on the chalk lines at Wimbledon (TfL/Eleanor Bentall)

We reported on Jack Draper, the latest British male tennis hope, last weekend: “Serving for the match, Draper saved two break points – one with a forehand plum on the line – and roared to the crowd for encouragement.”

Thanks to Roger Thetford for reminding us that the conventional spelling is “plumb”, from Latin plumbum, lead, as in a lead weight hung on a string to indicate a vertical line. The notion of exact measurement led to the extended adverbial sense of “completely, downright” by the 18th century, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary.

The dictionary notes that in this sense the word is sometimes spelt plump, plum or plunk, one at least of which we can confirm.

Lost battle: In the article about HS2, we quoted someone complaining that houses that had been compulsorily purchased on the route were falling into “rack and ruin”. A reader suggested that this should be “wrack and ruin”, and claimed that I have said so in the past. I don’t think I have. I am a tolerant curmudgeon who does not believe in fighting on when a cause is lost.

It is true that the origin of the phrase, an example of duplication for emphasis, is “wrack”, a variant of “wreck”, but the spelling without the “w” is much more common. Given that neither wrack nor rack makes sense in modern English – and no one is familiar with the phrase “wreck and ruin” – I am happy to leave “rack and ruin” alone.

New at the zoo: Some word-muddlings are such fun and so reasonably rare in The Independent that I take a childish delight in them, and want to frame rather than “correct” them. Under the headline, “More than 20 giraffe body parts imported to the UK,” the subheadline read: “Grizzly haul part of hundreds of ‘trophies’ claimed on hunts.”

No bears were involved in this story. Thank you, John Schluter, yes we did mean “grisly”.

Understatement: We miscounted in our editorial on Friday, saying that Keir Starmer is only the third Labour leader to have won a majority in the Commons. We then listed them: Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Starmer. Thank you to Richard Thomas.

I demand a public inquiry: We used the phrase “a review into” three times in the last week. A headline on the front page on Thursday said: “Health fears over weight-loss jabs prompt official review into harmful side effects.”

Previously, we said that Wes Streeting’s investigation of NHS maternity services would include “an urgent review into the worst performing services”, and in a report about BBC Breakfast, we said: “The BBC has hired a consultant to conduct an internal review into the bullying and misconduct allegations.”

Those should have been reviews “of” harmful side effects, worst performing services and bullying allegations. You have an inquiry “into” something or a review “of” it.

Shut this usage down: We used “shutter” as a verb last week, which is an Americanism. “Australia, which shuttered its embassy in Tehran and evacuated staff on Friday, pushed for a diplomatic end to the conflict,” we said. Meanwhile, Sam Kiley, our world affairs editor, showed how the word should be used, in a dispatch from Tel Aviv: “Businesses and shops are shuttered.”

That is that; the end: Thank you for reading this far. This is the last Mea Culpa column. It is time to bring the show to an end while the crowd still wants more. I am grateful to you, our readers, for your attention to this matter, as Donald Trump would say, and for all your emails on the finer points of the English language. If you see errors in The Independent, please do continue to write to managingeditor@independent.co.uk