Mea Culpa: rehearsing for a spell of retirement

Janet Street-Porter in her column last week wrote about how she was, as a result of the coronavirus, “being forced to experience PR”. This was her abbreviation for “practice retirement”, that is, a rehearsal for pensioner status.

It is a distinctive phrase, so naturally we used it in the headline, which (briefly) read: “Coronavirus is forcing me to practice retirement – and it isn’t all bad.” However, in shortening the phrase we turned “practice” into a verb, which by arbitrary convention is spelt “practise” in British English.

So we had either to change the spelling in the headline, which would make it different from the noun phrase “practice retirement” in the article, or we had to do what we did, which is to change it to: “Coronavirus is forcing me into practice retirement.”

No regrets: A reader objected to another headline on a comment article last week: “Regretfully, a chance to procure ventilators somehow ended up in Boris Johnson’s spam folder.” That should have been “Regrettably”, we were told. Well, that is how I would write it, but I don’t think there are enough people who would regard “Regretfully” as wrong to justify changing it.

There are people, for example, who say that you shouldn’t write “hopefully” to mean “it is to be hoped that”. I think the objection is that it is unclear who is full of hope – or regret. But the implication is that it is the writer, so “regretfully” is fine.

Sphericisation: We used that charming tautology, “in a globalised world”, in an article about the Mediterranean diet. We know what it means – indeed the next part of the sentence spelt it out, “with increasing migration”, but what it says is “in a worldified world”.

Jargon watch: The global pandemic has been accompanied by an outbreak of the phrase “underlying health conditions” or “underlying health issues”. This sounds like medical jargon, in which case we should translate it into normal English. “Conditions” and “issues” are mushy ways of saying “problems”, and “underlying” isn’t quite right, because they only “underlie” the coronavirus infection once the sufferer has got it, and much of the time we are talking about protecting vulnerable people from catching it. I would suggest “existing medical problems”, but I am open to better ideas.