Mea Culpa: fill up with Latin pedantry

Living and dead languages in The Independent this week

Sir Vince Cable: immigration is complementary to the interests of British workers, not complimentary (Reuters)

The difference between compliment and complement is one of those tiresome idiosyncrasies of standardised English spelling that ought not to matter. They both come from the same Latin root, complementum, from complere “fill up” (which also gave us complete).

So something that is complementary completes it, or adds to it in a balancing way. Something that is complimentary, on the other hand, is expressive of praise or admiration, because compliment is the same word that arrived via Italian, complimento, meaning “completing the requirements of courtesy”.

This week we quoted Sir Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, on his attempts to persuade Theresa May when they were in coalition government together, citing studies that showed “overseas workers have been complimentary rather than competitive to British workers”. Thanks to Henry Peacock for pointing it out. It has been changed to complementary: Sir Vince argues that immigration has been associated with rising wages for British workers, adding rather than taking away.

It is important to know about this arbitrary convention because, even if everyone knows what we mean, standard spelling is a quality marker. Readers are more likely to trust The Independent if we conform.

Not invited: The same argument applies to changes in usage. Language changes, and The Independent rejoices in novelty. But we ought to be slightly behind the curve if we want to retain the respect of readers for whom new uses are unfamiliar, or who regard them as uneducated or wrong.

We reported this week on the EU’s failure to invite the Prime Minister to a meeting about migration, and said: “The Government says that the lack of an invite for Ms May was justified because Britain is leaving the EU.” Anthony Slack thought we should have said “invitation”, and so we should. “Invite” used to be only the verb form, but these days is commonly used as a shorter form of “invitation”. In our reporting we should err on the side of formality.

Classics primer: We had a spot of bother with our actual Latin this week, describing Jacob Rees-Mogg as “the Eton College alumni”. That’s the plural, as Richard Parry pointed out. We meant alumnus, the masculine singular of the Latin for pupil, meaning former student. My rule is to avoid foreign and dead languages wherever possible, even when writing about Rees-Mogg, who tweets in Latin, and this is an example of the kind of confusion we can get into. Would we describe Jacob’s sister Annunziata as a Godolphin and Latymer alumna? We could have just called him “the Old Etonian”.