Mea Culpa: rehearsing for a spell of retirement
Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent
Janet Street-Porter in her column last week wrote about how she was, as a result of the coronavirus, “being forced to experience PR”. This was her abbreviation for “practice retirement”, that is, a rehearsal for pensioner status.
It is a distinctive phrase, so naturally we used it in the headline, which (briefly) read: “Coronavirus is forcing me to practice retirement – and it isn’t all bad.” However, in shortening the phrase we turned “practice” into a verb, which by arbitrary convention is spelt “practise” in British English.
So we had either to change the spelling in the headline, which would make it different from the noun phrase “practice retirement” in the article, or we had to do what we did, which is to change it to: “Coronavirus is forcing me into practice retirement.”
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