Mea culpa: hanging on to some intriguing etymology

John Rentoul, our chief pedant, on last week’s Independent

- 

"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.