Mea Culpa: the Ukrainian army’s modern version of ancient heroics

An article about the changing tactics of the Ukrainian armed forces featured a former computer programmer with the call sign “Grumpy”, and said: “Grumpy is the sort of warrior that young people enjoy pretending to be in video games and nostalgic tales of SAS daring-do from the Second World War.”

A couple of readers commented that they expected to see “derring-do” there, an old-fashioned construction meaning daring deeds or daring action, associated with Biggles and similar fiction. In fact, it is a much older compound than that, and it literally meant “daring (to) do”, so our spelling was true to its origins.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Chaucer used “dorrying don”, from Middle English durren, to dare, and don, infinitive of do, to mean “daring to do” what is proper to a brave knight. It was spelt derrynge in the 1500s and was mistaken for a noun by Spenser, who took it to mean “manhood and chevalrie”; before being picked up from him by Sir Walter Scott and passed on to the Romantic poets as a pseudo-archaism. All we were doing was modernising it, just as Grumpy was.

Angel Digits: A striking instance of spurious accuracy cropped up in our report of the case of the British couple accused of drug smuggling in Indonesia. We reported: “Mr Umbara told the district court in Denpasar, Bali, that a lab test result confirmed that 10 sachets of Angel Delight powdered dessert mix in Collyer’s luggage, combined with seven similar sachets in his partner’s suitcase, contained 993.56 grams (2.19 pounds) of cocaine, worth an estimated 6bn rupiah (£271,743).”

Thanks to Iain Brodie, who found the use of five, three and six significant digits discombobulating. No doubt the first number was what was reported to the court, in a faintly comical attempt to make the lab results seem properly scientific and ungainsayable. But to a normal person, we are talking about a kilo of cocaine, which does not need to be converted into pounds and ounces, as our readers are familiar with kilograms. And the 6bn rupiah is obviously a rough estimate, so £270,000 would have been more than enough detail for the sterling equivalent.

Best of three: In an article about Donald Trump’s use of pardons, we said: “With well-known rappers including Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne, the latter of whom himself received a pardon from Trump…” Thanks to Teri Walsh for suggesting that we should have said “last”, because “latter” refers to the second or “later” of two things.

Backing and forthing: In a news story about the strategic defence review, we reported that, “just two weeks out from the review’s publication, there was still some toeing and froing over which department would foot the bill”, referring to a dispute between the foreign office and the Ministry of Defence over the cost of the Chagos treaty.

Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out that this is usually spelt “toing and froing”, because otherwise it looks like toeing as in “toeing the line”. The departmental squabble has nothing to do with feet, but with the phrase “to and fro”, meaning back and forth.

Incidentally, Roger asked if “fro” is one of those words that is only ever used with one other word. It is, so I have added it to my list, which started as a Top 10 but now has 21 entries: amok, askance, aspersions, bated, betide, clarion, dudgeon, dulcet, figment, forfend, fro, halcyon, hale, inclement, knell, petard, shebang, shrift, scot, serried and squib.

Not the dog show: Sometimes one of our writers uses a word I don’t know and it is fine because it is guessable from the context, and I come away feeling that I have learned something. Thus it was with our article about the threat to Google’s dominance of internet search, which said that one of the things holding back the company’s artificial intelligence rivals is “the unnecessary cruft that comes with the current overly verbose AI answers”.

I didn’t know that “cruft” is slang for “badly designed, unnecessarily complicated, or unwanted code or software”, but I could guess and now I do. The sum of human knowledge has been increased.