Mea Culpa: the negative trap of saying the opposite of what we mean

Questions of style, usage and spelling in The Independent

Sid Ouared, the former BA worker sacked for wearing a ‘man bun’

In our report this week on the man who was dismissed from BA for wearing his hair in a bun we said: “The rules for women are no less forgiving.” It’s the old inverted comparator trap. The more common form is to say something like “it is impossible to underestimate…” when we mean the opposite. On this occasion we meant “no more forgiving”. Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing it out.

The thing about these mistakes is that they often happen when the correct comparison is confusing because it is phrased in the negative. If you feel tempted to make a negative comparison, stop and think about what you want to say. Here, what we really meant was that the rules for women are just as strict as those for men. Why not say that instead?

Complimentary advice: In the same article we quoted from BA’s rule book about coloured hair. Apparently this must “compliment” natural hair colour. I don’t know if this was BA’s spelling or ours, but the convention is to spell it “complement” when it means match, balance, enhance.

This is a quite absurd pedantry because, although the Oxford Dictionary insists the two spellings are “quite different in meaning”, they are the same word. It comes from Latin complementum, completion, and has developed different nuances over the centuries. The sense of “completing or fulfilling the requirements of courtesy” has come to be spelt with an “i” – paying someone a compliment or complimentary chocolates. The sense of completing something by contrast or enhancement is spelt with an “e”, as is the sense closest to the original of a quantity needed, such as “a full complement of staff”.

This is a silly convention, but it is one of those markers of educated writing, so we make ourselves look authoritative by observing it.

Le Carre the Less: Another inverted comparison made a mess of a denunciation of private schooling in a comment article. It said: “No less than John le Carre, an alumnus of Sherborne and former master at Eton College”, had launched a “searing critique” of the British education system. It needed to say something like “no less an authority than John le Carre…” At least we got the singular of alumni right.

Shrinking multiple: We recently published a dispatch from the Faroe Islands, in which we said that the capital, Torshavn, has “a population around 10 times smaller than the Isle of Wight”. Philip Nalpanis wrote to say that he found this multiplication “mind-bending”. He has a point. It would be easier to grasp if we had said its population is about one tenth that of the Isle of Wight.

But, as Mr Nalpanis said, it is worse than that. How many readers have a good idea of the number of people on the Isle of Wight? The population of greater Torshavn is 21,000. That is about twice the population of Stornoway, the largest island town in Scotland, or, if we want to emphasise how small it is, we could have said it is smaller than Ryde on the Isle of Wight, which has a population of 24,000.