Mea Culpa: Hanging on to some intriguing etymology

Questions of usage and style in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Readers can, quite understandably, get hung up on the correct spelling of the building where planes are stored (AP)

I enjoyed our feature on the 29 worst movie mistakes, as I suppose it is just a different kind of pedantry. Muphry’s Law ensured that it had a mistake of its own. (Muphry’s Law holds: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” It often applies to this column.)

In the item about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, we said: “John Connor’s Cessna plane numbers keep changing in the film. When he is in the hanger on the runway it is N3035C, but once it’s flying, the numbers change to N3413F.”

That was changed to “hangar” when it was spotted by a colleague. A trivial error, because nobody could have been confused as to the meaning, and who really cares that two words that sound the same are spelt differently?

Regular readers will be familiar with my response to that, which is that as long as some people recognise the departure from conventional spelling, it makes our writing seem less authoritative, so we should care.

But also, the origins of the two words are fascinating. Hangar is French, an alteration of 14th-century French hanghart, shed. That in turn may be from Middle Dutch ham-gaerd, an enclosure near a house; or it may be from medieval Latin angarium, a shed in which horses are shod. It was first recorded meaning “shed for aeroplanes” in English in 1902, the year before the Wright brothers made the first powered flight.

Hanger, on the other hand, is from hang, of ancient Indo-European origin (the source of Gothic hahan, Hittite gang and Sanskrit sankate, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary).

What I did not know is that “hung” emerged as the past participle in northern English dialect in the 16th century, becoming the standard form, while “hanged” endured in legal language, which is more conservative – and that is why “hanged” remains the usual word for a judicial execution, while “hung” is used for everything else.

Murder mystery: We had this short headline on our front page on Thursday: “Husband charged with murder of wife found dead in car boot.” I stumbled over it, because it was unclear whether it was the husband or the wife who had been found. Because English is so flexible, a verb can attach itself either to the first person mentioned or to the person nearest to the verb in the sentence. A simple rewrite could have solved it, and would have fitted in the space: “Husband charged with murder of wife after body found in car boot.”

O to be in Estonia: In our report of Prince William visiting British troops in Estonia, the sub-headline said: “The prince meets with country’s president Alar Karis before travelling to visit Nato forces guarding the Russian border.” The Independent’s style for articles aimed at readers outside North America is just “meets”, without the “with”. Secondly, as Roger Thetford pointed out, “the Russian border” suggests the border as seen from the Russian side – the border belonging to Russia, between it and other countries. “The border with Russia” would have been clearer.

Too much punctuation: In an article about a farmer who was struggling to make ends meet, we described him as “the 39-year-old father-of-three”. That had too many hyphens, which were needed in “39-year-old”, because that is an adjectival phrase – describing the noun, which is “father of three”, without hyphens.