Mea Culpa: Bailing out of a plane, a boat, a jail or just out of trouble?

Spelling, etymology and other pedantry in this week’s Independent

US 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team ducking out during the Korean war (defenseimagery.mil)

I don’t know why the verb, bail out, is two words, while the noun, bailout, is one, but that is how it is. To bail out or a bailout, as Philip Nalpanis wrote to point out. (Perhaps his email should be called a pointout.)

We had written that Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, had been criticised for his decision to “bailout” Virgin Trains from the East Coast franchise. We were right to put it in quotation marks, because the claim that Grayling has let the company off billions that it ought to pay to the Government is contested. The company says that the Government has failed to fulfil its side of the franchise deal, by which it promised to supply new trains and track upgrades.

But bail out should be two words.

Making hay? As for the meaning of of the phrase, I have written in the past about how parachuting out of an aircraft used to be spelt “bale”. Guy Keleny, my predecessor, had a theory that this was because paratroopers jumping out of the back of a transport aircraft looked like hay bales falling out of a combine harvester.

I think the similar senses of bail are increasingly spelt the same. Paying for someone accused of a crime to be released temporarily, scooping water out of a boat and jumping out of a plane are all bailing. They were originally different words, meaning either to be got out of trouble or to abandon responsibility, but have converged.

We would write bale only when talking about making blocks of hay or similar material – for example, we had a letter this week that mentioned “compressed or baled” waste plastic.

Sounds like: In our report of Damian Hinds, the new Education Secretary, being tipped as a possible successor to Theresa May, we said he has been talked of for months among Conservative ranks as a star of the future, “but his assent to the Cabinet has now sparked more public praise.”

Assent and ascent are two words that sound the same but which have different meanings marked by different spellings, as Bernard Theobald pointed out. Assent means agreement, from Latin assentire, from ad- “towards” and sentire, “feel, think”. Ascent, an upward climb, is a 16th-century back-formation from ascend (from Latin ascendere, from ad- and scandere, “to climb”) copying the older verb-noun pair of descend and descent.

The origins of the difference are fascinating, depending on one’s taste for etymology, but the result is quite arbitrary. It is surprising we don’t get the two confused more often.

And finally: An apology. Last week I criticised a headline in the business section of the daily edition: “FTSE 100 digs deep to close 2017 at a record high.” Down is not up, I said. It turns out that Peter Carbery, one of our finest sub-editors, had done it on purpose, because – as the report said in the first paragraph – the surge was powered largely by shares in mining companies. The headline was, in fact, a work of self-knowing genius.