Not only do most people find it difficult to name ten famous Belgians without falling back on Tintin and Hercule Poirot, but Belgium seems to be the only country name that English-speaking people get mixed up with its adjective. From The Independent on Saturday 21 November 2009:

Sweet treats are available at Marks & Spencer this week with half-price Belgium chocolate selections. Both a 480g Belgium chocolate selection and a 1kg tin of Belgium chocolate biscuits are reduced from £12 to just £5.99.

So, not simply a slip of the fingers in typing, but a belief by the writer that this was the correct form. The BBC refers to its “Scotland correspondent” and its “Rome correspondent”, and it would be appropriate to talk of a “Belgium correspondent”. Using the adjective in these cases would imply that the correspondent was Scottish (in the case of the Scotland correspondent, he/she usually is), Italian (from Rome) or Belgian respectively, as opposed to a correspondent writing about that country. However, there is nothing similar in the use of the country name when referring to chocolate, so the adjective is the one to use.

One of my voluntary jobs is proofreading a local newsletter. In this month’s offering, I have just changed the following description:

Beautiful singing and top draw musicianship in the English folk tradition

My immediate reaction – and the one I have acted on – was to change ‘draw’ to ‘drawer’, but on reflexion, ‘top draw’ might also be appropriate in this context. Perhaps these musicians are among those who attract a better than average audience, and so are a ‘top draw’, as well as being very good – ‘out of the top drawer’.

No rhotic speaker could ever have written the wrong word here, but I live in a non-rhotic part of England, and there will always be some doubt about which word is intended for the pronunciation /drɔː/.

“An elderly woman was the victim of a street robbery which netted the thief just £10. … The offender walked behind the victim for a short time before grabbing her handbag, causing her to fall to the floor.” (My local paper this week)

In this context, I should have written ground rather than floor, as the event took place outside. The Oxford Reference Dictionary gives, as section 7 under floor, “colloq. ground”, but the usual formal meaning of ‘floor’ is a surface under cover, and ‘ground’ is a surface covered only by the sky.

This wording explains why ‘floor’ can also be the surface of a forest, cave or ocean, all of which have a covering that is not directly the sky.

Interestingly, although I can accept either ‘cave floor’ or ‘floor of the cave’, and ’sea/ocean floor’ or (less easily) ‘floor of the sea/ocean’, for ‘forest floor’ I can’t accept the alternative ‘floor of the forest’. And although wood is more-or-less synonymous with forest, I can’t accept ‘*wood floor’ at all.

Do others agree? or is this simply a part of my idiolect?

In this morning’s (9 November 2009) Start the Week (BBC Radio 4, 9 a.m.), there was a discussion of a new film biography. In introducing it, Andrew Marr, the presenter, used the word biopic, and pronounced it to rhyme with “myopic”.

I assume he was reading from a script, in which case it might simply have been a spelling pronunciation which he failed to spot in time to self-correct, but it might also have been his normal pronunciation of this word (but it would still be a spelling pronunciation).

Biopic is a blend word formed from the first syllables of the words “biographical” and “picture”. Many phrases are written in the first place as two words. Then with familiarity, they turn into a hyphenated phrase, and eventually, if they become fixed enough, the hyphen disappears, leaving a new compound word. For instance, we have offshore - no hyphen, but off-peak. Similarly, there are two different treatments of positions on the cricket field: mid-off and mid-on, but midwicket. There seems no logic to these, other than a desire to emphasize where the division of the two elements occurs (’midoff’, ‘midon’ look a bit odd – but that could simply be their unfamiliarity).

In the case of biopic, it might have been preferable for the word to have retained a hyphen for the same reason: so that its etymology, and meaning, were more obvious, leading to no “mistakes” in pronunciation – /baɪˈɒpɪk/ seems to me to be much more likely to be an adjective than a noun, and /ˈbaɪəʊpɪk/, as given in all the standard pronunciation dictionaries, is quite clearly the one intended by whoever first coined the word.