On Saturdays, The Independent newspaper has a column called “Errors and Omissions”, which discusses infelicities in the language used in the paper over the previous seven days.

Yesterday it discussed the use (or not) of the definite article with “Ukraine”. Guy Keleny (writer of the piece) seems to be against omitting the article on the grounds that what Ukrainians do, even when speaking English, is irrelevant – they are not native speakers of English, and their usage, while it should be noted by us, ought not to determine our linguistic behaviour.

There are other country names whose definite article has been lost – Lebanon and Gambia are two that immediately come to mind. In the cases of Ukraine and Lebanon, these are names for places which used to form part of larger countries and have become independent: Ukraine from Russia, and Lebanon from Syria. In the case of Gambia, this is the name of a river, and river names are usually preceded by the definite article – The Thames, The Rhine, The Potomac. Geographical areas are also usually given an article – the Caucasus, the Maghreb. And in English, the Netherlands, though in Dutch the name is simply Nederland, neither ‘articled’ nor plural.

Many island groups also carry the article – the British Isles, the Maldives, the Philippines.

I have some sympathy for Mr Keleny – I used to argue against John Simpson that the adjective formed from Iran was Iranian, pronounced /ɪˈreɪnɪən/, not /ɪˈrɑːnɪən/, regardless of what Iranians themselves say when speaking English,  just as we say /bəˈheɪmɪən/ for the adjective from Bahamas. I also argued that just because the Chinese were now insisting on spelling the name of their capital Beijing, we had no need to change our well-established anglicisation Peking. After all, the French and Spanish call London ‘Londres’, and we have our own spellings for many European cities, and almost all country names. Must we change them as well?

However, time moves on, and we do abandon some of these established anglicisations, as has happened with Saragossa, Flushing, and Leghorn over the past century.

One thing Mr Keleny has got wrong: the Chinese have not changed the name of their capital, simply its spelling in Roman letters. The Indian cities of Mumbai and Chennai, on the other hand, have had not just the spelling, but the names changed to eradicate supposedly colonial connotations.

Two years ago, I wrote a post on the Queen’s English Society as it set up an “English Academy”, and I ended my post “Who will prove the futility of the Queen’s English Society’s efforts to its members?”

We now have the answer: its own members. BBC News has just reported that fewer than twenty bothered to turn up to the AGM, and that it has been decided to wind up the Society.

There’s nothing more to be said, I think.

It seems that anything can be “iconic”. I’ve collected all of the following in just a few weeks:

The turtle is an iconic species.

The beauty of a traditional radio telescope is iconic.

Al-Qaeda targets iconic buildings.

The Roundhouse, in London, is iconic, as are the ruins of Greyfriars at Dunwich (both obviously to be targeted by Al-Qaeda!)

Terence Conran is Britain’s most iconic designer.

The gull-wing doors of the Mercedes 300 are iconic.

Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes in “Now Voyager” is an iconic image.

The OED has no earlier quotations than 1976 for what one has to assume is the meaning in all these cases:

“Designating a person or thing regarded as representative of a culture or movement; important or influential in a particular (cultural) context”.

How quickly meanings can spread.

This Murdoch company is in the news again today with the most recent appearance of James Murdoch before the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World.

The name of the company is usually abbreviated to “News Corp”, and it’s interesting how many people pronounce this without the final ‘p’ – /’njuːz kɔː/. The pronunciation /kɔː/ is normal for the word corps, as a military unit, but I don’t remember ever having it heard as an abbreviation for corporation except in this context. Some BBC reporters are ‘guilty’ in this respect, but presenters such as Martha Kearney on The World at One are keeping to the longer pronunciation, which is the only one given in both the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. The latest edition of the EPD that I own doesn’t give the abbreviation at all. I wonder how long it will be before the innovative pronunciation finds its way into the dictionaries.

Jack Windsor Lewis (here) either acclaims me as or accuses me of – according to your point of view – being a champion player of the rant against unusual pronunciations. He also names John Maidment in the same context. I can’t speak for John, of course, but my rants are always aimed at people who are speaking professionally and publicly, and who therefore (in my view) should take care that the style of speech they use, including the pronunciation of individual words, is not going to interfere with the transmission of information. Unusual pronunciations, in my opinion, hinder this by making the listener (and I include television viewers as listeners in this case) concentrate on the form of the communication rather than its content. In a parallel way, professional writers need to use both traditional orthography and accepted ‘standard’ grammar in their published work, unless they specify otherwise – as Jack does for his blog.

This, therefore, is not a rant, but an observation. I was recently at a concert where the artists introduced each item with a short talk about either the composer or the work they were about to play, or both. In introducing a string quartet by Shostakovich, one of the quartet members said that the composer had been /kəʊˈhɜːst/ by the Soviet government into making statements and writing certain pieces of music. This is an unusual pronunciation of the word coerced, and I wondered how it had arisen. She was not a professional speaker, and possibly unused to addressing an audience, so it may not be surprising that she ‘mis-spoke’ (in the manner of some American presidents).

Two possible sources for the mistake come to mind – rehearse, which is a word very familiar to musicians, and cohere. Add to that the thousand-year struggle for the /h/ phoneme to retain its ‘proper’ place in English phonology, and it is quite understandable that confusion should reign, and a nervous speaker opt for the unexpected usage I, and about seventy other people, heard.

On the other hand, if it had been a BBC presenter …