Perceived lapses in usage can ignite real anger in readers but getting the Guardian's facts right must always be our priority
We all know English is the vampire amoeba that never sleeps. That is, our reasoning brains know this; just as they know all languages absorb and mutate over time.
What seems harder is coping with individual changes in practice. When we watch a word lose the precision of meaning we were taught (decimate), or the fall into disuse of a supposed iron rule (compare with v compare to), perspective can fly out of the window and emotion rush in, often under the banner of Defending Civilised Values as We Were Taught Them at an Impressionable Age. Possibly by someone rather given – breakfast table? schoolroom? – to fulminations of a superior sort.
The readers' editor's postbag, reader@guardian.co.uk, testifies to the anger any lapse in Guardian usage can ignite. Not just outright misspellings but use of refute instead of rebut, disinterested instead of uninterested, hung instead of hanged. And yet... refute, disinterested, hanged, all three are visibly and audibly changing in daily use. In a few years, it's quite possible people will use them interchangeably with rebut, uninterested and hung. Losing much sleep over "inflammable", anyone?
This is not to advocate a free-for-all but to argue for balance, and a recognition that rules coexist with change.
Only a small minority of our incoming emails are about spelling and grammar – off the top of my head, well under 5% – and this makes sense, because the Guardian's error rate in these areas is statistically infinitesimal set against daily wordage published.
But these emails can be among the most abusive. "Stupid" and "ignorant" and "uneducated" are terms to be heard; an echo of how the present-day emailers were once addressed by the fulminators, I wonder? Some such emails also carry a not-so-veiled suggestion that shoddy writing typifies younger people; in our case, younger reporters and subeditors presumably. How all this sits with civilised values I'm not quite sure.
Yes, it's a subject that generates heat. So in this, the third of an informal set of Open door columns – 24 October 2011, 5 March and 2 April – reflecting aloud on how the corrections system works and what its priorities are, it's worth looking at where usage fits in the pecking order.
On a day-to-day basis, far less time is given to dealing with usage than in the late 1990s, when the corrections system was new and built around a newspaper instead of a giant website. Even in those days, fact came first. But today, factual errors are not thrown out with the day's paper, they live on digitally; putting them right is where most of our time and wo/manpower is focused. This is also the priority of readers who write in. Every newspaper prizes its fine stylists, yet also knows the bedrock of its journalistic reputation is factual reliability. (When it comes to use of English, the Guardian's Mind your language blog devotes itself to this subject exclusively and engrossingly at guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language).
Where we do aim to correct spelling errors in online pages is in headlines, or the names of people, places and organisations. We don't pretend to have the resources for micro-fixing every their and they're, or it's and its, or led and lead. When it comes to grammar, we try to correct if the error or imprecision has made the meaning very unclear.
In the corrections and clarifications column itself, a sense of proportion weighs strongly with me in highlighting poor usage. Noting repeat offences – principle v principal, say – seems worth doing from time to time. But I would almost never print a correction along these lines: "In a story about a targeted arson attack – Former spouse convicted in house fire that killed three children, page 3 – we said inferred when we meant implied." It would just seem a robotic denigration of the subject matter, not to mention the reporter's overall achievement (though we might well try to repair the online version).
Occasionally in such cases I have written explaining the absence of a published correction to any readers who complained; and occasionally a reply has come back along these lines: "Of course, I do understand. I saw the mistake, I just saw red. In fact, I thought the story was excellent. I forgot to say so." Spoken like a true Graunista.