Mea Culpa: Do we know our subordinating conjunctions from our inoculations?

Would The Independent pass the Government's primary-school spelling and grammar test, which caught out the schools minister this week?

I wouldn’t pass a primary-school spag (spelling and grammar) test, because I have no idea what a subordinating conjunction is and doubt if it is a helpful form of words. But I do know you need to be careful with phrases that come after “which”.

On Thursday, we reported the news on the junior doctors’ dispute: “In a potentially significant breakthrough in the long-running dispute, all work to implement the new contracts, which will require more weekend working, will be suspended.”

I stumbled over this, because I first read it as saying that the work of implementing the contracts would require more weekend working. The “which” clause could apply to the whole clause before it, or, which was what we meant, just to the word “contracts”. Better to re-order the sentence: “In a potentially significant breakthrough in the long-running dispute over more weekend working, all work to implement the new contracts will be suspended.”

As for spelling... : English, being English, has three words for vaccinate, and they are all tricky. Immunise is not too hard but inoculate caught us out. It comes from the Latin, inoculare, to graft a bud from one plant to another. Sean O’Grady got it right in his article about why he was voting for Sadiq Khan this week (something about inoculating Labour every 40 years or so against lurching to the left), but we spelled it with two ns in the subheadline.

Redundancy: We used the filler phrase “the fact that” too often this week. It can usually be cut out altogether or replaced by just “that”. On Thursday, in an article about the CV of Johannes Haushofer, the Princeton psychology professor who listed his failures, we said that he “ironically pointed out the fact that the document had received” more attention than all his academic work. “The fact” could have been struck out. (And the word “ironically” would have been better before “received”: it was the reception, not his pointing out, that was ironic.)

On Wednesday we wrote about the discovery that some thyroid tumours were not cancers. We said: “They are often wrongly included due to their microscopic appearance meeting the criteria, despite the fact that they act like benign tumours.” We could have simply said, “... although they act like benign tumours.”

Time to bale out: The Independent used to spell the verbs bale and bail differently. We distinguished between baling out of an aircraft with a parachute and two senses of bail: bailing water out of a boat and bailing an accused criminal from custody. My predecessor Guy Keleny said he thought bale was spelled thus because parachutists looked like straw bales falling from a combine harvester.

Whatever the reason, we increasingly use “bail” for all senses now. On Wednesday, we had a news story headlined: “The super rich were the first to bail when Lehman Brothers collapsed.” We were referring to people who sold shares in the first few days of the banking crisis. They were like parachutists abandoning a plane. However, “to bail”, a shorter and once mainly American way of saying “to bail out”, is now predominant. I suspect that we are reaching the stage where “the first to bale” would look odd.

Too much: In a travel article about the Outer Hebrides on Wednesday, we wrote of the “all-too-ubiquitous pebbledash bungalows”. I feel ungenerous for pointing this out because the sense is clear, but ubiquitous means the quality of being everywhere, and the horrible bungalows can’t be “too everywhere”.