A Word on the Words

YOU’LL find a two-page spread in this week’s paper, on pages 12 and 13, telling of a new book The Sunday Post has put out.

It’s a good book, in fact I recommend you buy it forthwith!

I’ve spent a lot of time working on it, which has involved examining our glorious newspaper in the 1950s.

Even I’m not old enough to have been working for the paper in 1950, so I was a little surprised by some things I found.

For instance, in those days the paper always hyphenated the words to-day and to-morrow.

“To day” was two words until the 16th Century, but from then until the early 20th Century was hyphenated.

I suspect what happened is that 1950s Sunday Post staff didn’t take easily or quickly to new-fangled spellings. They were, it must be said, much like I am now.

The watchword in any newspaper is brevity. If there are two ways of spelling a word, we use the shorter alternative. We

spell tranquility with one L, we don’t put an E in the middle of judgment.

The idea is that with many small savings like that we can fit more words in, giving better value for money. So that hyphen shouldn’t be in “to-day”. It wastes space.

I wouldn’t use to-day with a hyphen, but I’m proud to be carrying on a fine tradition of Sunday Post staff being sticklers-for-the-rules pedants when it comes to the language!

Because, whereas I support the idea that English has to evolve, it shouldn’t change without a very good reason to change.

I get rather angry when I hear that dictionaries have changed the definitions of words to “reflect current usage”.

The worst abuse is the Oxford English Dictionary changing the definition of “literally” to allow it to be: “used for emphasis rather than being actually true”.

The OED now condones: “We were literally killing ourselves laughing”.

So what word do we now use when we mean “literally”? Because if it merely denotes emphasis, it literally doesn’t mean literally any more.

The Sunday Post sub-editors of the 1950s would not have, I can assure you, killed themselves laughing at this.

Steve will be signing copies of the Pass It On book at Waterstones, Dundee, on Tuesday, March 14, 6.30pm, and The Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, 7pm, on Friday, March 17. Entry to both events is free.