The Wrong Word Entirely, # 27

Every autumn, a writer at The Telegraph feels obliged to concoct a ‘news’ report on this theme:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Discipline files reveal high jinks of Cambridge students’

The one above is from November 2010, and both headline and text are about par for the course. However, there seems to have been a small change this year ― and I’m not referring to the university concerned. This was printed in the newspaper:

Source: The Daily Telegraph, 12/10/13, p. 5

This appeared online:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Oxford Brookes University gets in a flap […]’*

In The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘high jinks’ is listed as definition 3 of jink, n.1. It’s thought to be related to the verb jink, and has Scottish roots; no variant spellings are shown in the description or the examples. Jinx originated in the USA and is derived from the modern-latinate jynx. (Apparently jinks is sometimes used in place of jinx.) Collins and Merriam Webster confirm that jinks and jinx are different words, with different meanings and unrelated etymologies.

Perhaps journalists should consider using the term pranks instead.

* The item’s full title was ‘Oxford Brookes University gets in a flap over students’ partridge-plucking exploits’. I can imagine the journalistic disappointment on discovering that the fowl weren’t pheasants…