In a way, one has to admit that the role-reversal is rather a pleasant one: that the British Prime Minister’s wife is richer than him. Speaking of marrying up! What’s not so pleasant is the combined (or individual) wealth of Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty, plus the multi-billion business she inherits one day. Meanwhile, people can’t heat their homes anymore.
With an PM richer than the king, it’s hard to see why public funding should line his pocket even more: a firm founded by his billonaire father-in-law has recently signed a deal with oil and gas giant BP — just in time for the government to release hundreds of new licences for fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea. Plus Shell’s CEO joining Sunak’s new business council. They’re not even hiding in plain sight anymore.
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Little wonder, then, that environmental organisations like Greenpeace are sounding the alarm on high-scale nepotism sacrificing our future for ever-more astonishing levels of riches. As a response, activists scaled one of Sunak’s mansions, and let banners of black drop from the rooftops. The colour of grief, awfully reminiscent of oil smearing across the surface of the sea.
Little wonder, too, that conservative tabloids found fault with them:
I was struck by two things in this: the mouthful of the quotation at the top of the page, containing words like ‘supine’, ‘zealots’, and ‘impunity’ - lavish rhetoric if ever there was one! According to a long-term study by researchers at the University of London published in 2014, readers of tabloids had a lower vocabulary span than readers of no newspapers at all. I don’t know if this is the whole truth (it does seem a bit blasé), but “supine” is not a word I hear on a regular basis!
Even more surprisingly, there are two hyphens proudly peeping out of ‘self-obsessed’ and ‘eco-protesters’. Have journalists Brooke and Line swallowed a dictionary?!
Probably not.
Dictionaries such as the 2007 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary have suffered from severe hyphen haemorrhage in recent years: 16.000 of the little connecting bars have fallen victim to editors’ overly (dare I say) zealous approach to supposedly simplifying reading. Having screened many many (many many) texts printed and digitally published since 2000, the dictionary editors concluded that people didn’t know how to use hyphens (anymore? ever?), and so they might as well axe them, either pushing words together (“crybaby”, shudder), or tearing them apart (“hobby horse” 😥).
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Most of those compound words contain two nouns whose separation or involuntary fusion doesn’t create ambiguity, so one might as well, although there’s something to be said about the hyphen producing just the right amount of “stuff” on the page to connect, but not to clutter; to speed up reading while avoiding messiness. It has been marrying hand-holding words for over two thousand years after all.
Other word-combinations, however, shall remain untouched: anything with “self” (such as ‘self-obsessed’) or the occasional adjective (‘eco-warrior’ from “ecological”), as well as anything that’s potentially causing language mayhem when hyphen-deprived, witness the common “man eating chicken” and the terrifying “man-eating chicken”…
So, grammatically-speaking (grammatically speaking?), the Daily Mail’s got it right with its hyphenated word-chain. Ethically, now that’s a different story.
If you are interested in a deep dive into the concept of hyphens through some lovely Renaissance manuscripts, check the blog entries on my website here.
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