Mea Culpa: Future proofing

Susanna Richards declines to comment on next week’s mistakes in The Independent

A group of government ministers consult a visionary prior to committing to anything on Radio 4 (Getty)

We made an interesting error last week while writing about the Conservative Party’s struggle with its conscience over the climate crisis. Foreign Office minister Andrew Mitchell, we reported, had told a radio programme that he could not be certain that the proposal to stop the sale of new diesel and petrol cars after 2030 would come to fruition, saying: “Well, I’m afraid I can’t prophesise for the future.”

Of course, it was at this point incumbent on an unnamed minion of the editorial department (well, if you want something done properly...) to go and find out if he had really said that or not, and it turned out he hadn’t. “Prophesy” is the correct form, and the minister in question was not going to be caught short on that.

It’s not an uncommon confusion. In fact, so common is it that some online dictionaries offer “prophesise” as an alternative, but generally speaking we try to stick to the uncontroversial form in these instances, and so it was corrected. The interesting part is the reason it’s common, and that comes down to the four main suffixes in English that, when added to a word, denote the action of modifying (or becoming) something. These are “ate”, “(i)fy”, “en” and “ise”, and you will struggle to find such a word that doesn’t end with one of them.