Des Pond of Slough has contributed part of a recent report on Michael Gove’s latest pronouncements, which the new Justice Secretary and the Telegraph reporter have rather mangled between them:
In the first paragraph here, the phrases being discussed — ‘best-placed’ and ‘high quality’ — should be flagged, probably by quotation marks since newspapers tend to eschew italicization, as in fact occurs earlier in the report:
As for the instruction itself,
Cambridge Dictionaries Online points out that hyphenation is becoming less common, probably (my hypothesis) because fewer people are being taught how to use hyphens properly or how to check a dictionary to determine their correct usage, and possibly also as an influence from scientific writing. However, anyone who has been faced with a stream of apparently random words, and left by the writer to work out their relations and connections, might well argue, on the basis that punctuation is intended to aid clarity, that hyphens should be used consistently and more often than not. It should not be up to the reader to guess what the writer meant, and while common usage might be a case for some changes in language, changes that compromise clarity of expression are not progressive and/or beneficial, but unhelpful to effective communication.
Paragraph two above substitutes ‘arc’ for ‘ark’. Given the relative position on the keyboard of
c and
k, it is hard to excuse this as a typographical slip, so it must be a homophonous error, however unlikely. Even if whoever first transcribed Gove’s words failed to recognize the term as a biblical reference, you’d have thought the journalist might have encountered
Raiders of the Lost Ark, which, although an ‘oldie’, was the topic of a
feature article in
The Telegraph as recently as March 2015.
Finally, if Gove really said ‘unfitted’, I think he needs to call his grammar-guru Stephen Fry (see the article’s title) for more help. What he wants here is
unfit, which
Oxford Dictionaries defines as ‘not of the necessary quality or standard to meet a particular purpose’ and which is used of things; and not
unfitted which, unless related to clothing or furniture, refers only to persons being ‘not fitted or suited for a particular task or vocation’.
