Mea Culpa: The Pope’s pigeons on the button
In an about the Pope, who commented on the US election without actually telling Roman Catholics how to vote, we said: "Catholic voters can be hard to buttonhole." It is true that it can be difficult to gain the attention of a lot of voters for an intense conversation, which is why opinion pollsters find it so hard to obtain decent-sized samples. But someone's synapses had misfired, and we meant "pigeonhole", as Gavin Turner pointed out.
Both of those metaphors are rather indirect, not to say old-fashioned, so perhaps it is no surprise they were confused. To buttonhole someone means to grab them by the lapel (which has a buttonhole) to shout at them or beat them up, so, metaphorically, to detain them in conversation.
I don't suppose there are many pigeonholes left for the collection of letters and notes, even in private members' clubs and old-fashioned colleges. But I assume the analogy comes from the similar arrays of open boxes, which look like boxes for housing racing pigeons, used by the Post Office for sorting letters. To pigeonhole someone strictly means to put them with people living in the same postal district, but came to mean to assign them to a – usually simplified – category.
Where, when and why? In our sketch of Ed Davey's big speech to the Liberal Democrat annual conference in Brighton, we asked: "Was this the moment where Ed Davey finally abandoned cheesy stunts and revealed where he is leading the Lib Dems to?" This turned out to be a Question To Which The Answer Is No, but Paul Selden wrote to say that he thought the use of "where" where he would expect "when" was an example of an increasingly common confusion.
I agree that "when" would have been better. In this case, however, I think we didn't need either word. It would have been fine to say: "Was this the moment Ed Davey finally abandoned...?"
Box of chocs: The Independent is always keen to bring its readers evidence that leaving the European Union has made us poorer, so it is no wonder that we praised a report by economists from the Centre for Business Prosperity at Aston University in Birmingham, saying it was "choc full of those facts". Thanks to John Schluter for letting me know about this attempt to make the report sound like a box of chocolates.
"Choc" is short for "chocolate", while the phrase "chock full" means full to overflowing. It is of unknown origin, but it has been spelt with a "k" since at least 1400, when it was recorded as "chokkeful".
Dearly beloveds: I took exception to the phrase "loved ones" recently, suggesting that "friends and family" is more in keeping with factual news reporting. So I am grateful to Nigel Fox for bringing to my attention to its cousin, "beloved household name", referring to Huw Edwards.
"In our household he was simply a newsreader, and a somewhat overpaid one at that," said Nigel. Enough said.
