An Irishman's Diary

IT HAPPENED yet again yesterday. This time the victim was John Waters’s column on morality and the National Asset Management Agency.

Which was going along nicely, minding its own business, when suddenly a lower-case “l” – that slenderest and most treacherous of letter types – somehow slipped from the copy, leaving the following sentence: “Certainly since the late 1990s, it has been a matter of pubic faith that the economy should be left to its own devices . . . ”

This is a risk that serious newspapers, in which the word “public” will always feature prominently, run every day. It wouldn’t be as big a problem if, for example, it was the ‘b’ that kept dropping out. But then we or the spellchecker would notice that. Whereas the lower-case “l” has a Judas-like ability to slip away unnoticed, with embarrassing results.

A glance through our archive shows that in the recent past, it has excused itself from stories in such as a way as to suggest (1) that bankers’ confidentiality could be overridden in the “pubic interest”; (2) that Ireland needed more investment in “pubic transport”; (3) that the PSNI was “appealing to the pubic”; and (4) that in Philip Roth’s latest novel, Nathan Zuckerman had been left incontinent by an operation and was reluctant to swim in a “pubic pool”.

Not that long ago, either, a letter writer on this page took Tom Humphries to task for suggesting there had been huge “pubic” interest in Roy Keane’s time at Sunderland.

And our GAA coverage has not escaped either. The “Galway hurling pubic” featured in a recent report; while, after an off-field incident at a Dublin-Monaghan football match a while back, it was suggested that “a county chairman and a microphone combined to allow the business to spill over into the pubic domain”.

I know that county chairman, as it happens, and I can assure The Irish Times it was never his intention to allow the business to spill over in the manner suggested. Against which, I’m reminded of an unfortunate photograph that appeared in the latest Monaghan GAA yearbook. It was of a hurling match against Donegal last year, during which a player suffered a temporary wardrobe malfunction, causing the – yes – pubic domain to spill over into the public one.

Anyway, getting back to the missing “l” phenomenon, the worst thing is when it happens in obituaries. In recent years, we have paid tribute in these pages to at least one citizen whose long and distinguished life had been marked by a commitment to “pubic service”.

Perhaps worse, there was another man who was said to have made an outstanding contribution to “pubic life”: which sounds like something you need to treat with special shampoo.

When these things happen in a newspaper, as they will, the instinct of a chief sub-editor is to seize the offending staff members by the short and curlies and impress upon them the need for greater vigilance.

But I would argue that the recidivism rate suggests the fault lies with the word rather than the wordsmiths. “Pubic” is a clearly a sub-prime – even toxic – adjective; and unlike “public” we could do perfectly well without it. Maybe we should just ban the word, and reprogramme the spellchecker accordingly.

Certainly, if there was a Nama for the English language, it would be buying up such terms as “pubic” and removing them from the system, to help restore confidence.

NOT TO SUGGEST comparisons between The Irish Times and the Bible (although readers are free to draw such conclusions independently), this sort of thing has a long history. Even the Book of Kells, which has numerous spelling mistakes, was prone to it. Partly due to a missing “l” in Matthew 10:14, it turned the Latin word for “sword” into “joy”, thereby depriving the sentence “I came not to send peace, but a sword” of its meaning.

As biblical detectives will know, that missing “l” turned up 800 years later in Switzerland, where the Geneva Bible of 1762 had Matthew 5:9 saying “Blessed are the Placemakers”. This became known as the “Whig Bible”, after the British governing party, then notorious for inventing paid jobs – or “places” – for supporters (a practice happily unheard of in politics today).

One of the most notorious of all Bible errata was another Irish publication, from 1716. Instead of “Sin no more”, it featured John 5:14 urging Christians: “Sin on more”. Some 8,000 copies were printed before the mistake was caught. On that occasion, at least, the letter “l” could not be blamed. But it’s worth noting that a spellchecker would not have helped there either.

A CONCERNED reader has alerted me to a headline in the health supplement earlier this week, about the behaviour of young Irish people on holidays. “Young Use Condoms More When Abroad” it read. As my correspondent points out, it would be one thing if it said “Young Use More Condoms When Abroad”. But the implication was that there is recycling going on. Which, however durable these products are, is hardly advisable.

I’m just back from abroad, in fact, and I didn’t notice any such activity, although the campsite we stayed in had some aggressive pro-environment policies. Even so, the alleged practice clearly needs investigating. This is a matter of pubic interest, if ever there was one.