Mea Culpa: Pyrrhus and his ruinously winning ways

After Ancient Greek and Middle English, our chief pedant finally gives up over the names of European courts

Pyrrhus of Epirus’s legacy took a kicking on our pages this week

Our excellent review of Denial, the film about the libel case brought by David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian, concluded by saying: “Any victory over Holocaust deniers is likely to be pyrrhic unless the deniers change their beliefs.”

Pyrrhus was the Greek guy (above) who won victories against the Roman republic, but who suffered heavy casualties. “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined,” he said. Hence a pyrrhic victory is not the same as an empty victory, which is how we were using it here, but a victory won at too great a cost.

Sober document: We briefly had a headline on Thursday saying “MPs to pour over White Paper”. The usual spelling of the word meaning to read or study something intently is “to pore over”. The Oxford Dictionary says it is Middle English and thinks it may be related to “peer”. Anyway, that’s the spelling we wanted, unless, as Richard George wrote, we meant that MPs are going to soak the Brexit White Paper in whisky, which seemed slightly plausible as we illustrated the story with a photo of Kenneth Clarke.

Department for Exiting Euro-Pedantry: I was going to advise our writers not to call it the European Court of Justice, as we did in a news story this week. It changed its name to the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the same treaty that gave us Article 50. Which, while we are here, is not Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty but of the Treaty on European Union, which is a consolidated text created by the Lisbon Treaty. And, while we are still here, the Treaty on European Union is not the “Treaty of”, or the “Treaty of the”, but the “Treaty on”. But those are different Euro-pedantries.

This Euro-pedantry is that the Court is now called the CJEU, not the the ECJ. It is one level up from the entry-level pedantry of knowing the difference between the CJEU, based in Luxembourg, and the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, which is, of course, not an EU institution at all.

But it gets more complicated. The CJEU is not a single court but two. The higher court is called the Court of Justice, and the other is called the General Court (it used to be called the Court of the First Instance). So if we mean the Court of Justice rather than the two courts together, what are we supposed to call it? People seem to call it the European Court of Justice, which is what the two-court system used to be called.

At this point, I gave up. I am reminded of the response of my former colleague Jeremy Warner, when he was business editor of The Independent, to a complaint from Aviva, the insurance company formerly known as Norwich Union. He had called it Arriva, confusing it with the bus company, but he was – to my surprise and admiration – quite unapologetic. The company shouldn’t have chosen such a stupid name, he said, and it was entirely its fault if journalists got it wrong.

I feel the same about the European Court of Justice. If it changes its name for the sake of it and has a confusing structure, people will call it what they will. The ECJ is a more familiar abbreviation than the CJEU. On the other hand I suppose The Independent has to have a style, in which case it ought to be the CJEU, because we are almost always referring to both courts as a single entity. In the end, though, as there is almost always no ambiguity, I don’t think it really matters which name we use.