Pedantry corner

Few things annoy me more than seeing a good, engaging piece of writing betrayed by a sloppy mistake born of inadequate research or bad education.

And I really don't expect any quality drama the BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on to be getting the English language wrong.

But before us stands this line from the accused: Party Animals: Episode 6, BBC2, Wednesday 14 March

Danny (angrily addressing his colleague Kirsty): He pretty much inferred to me that you’d get the researcher’s job in exchange for fucking him.

Can you see the problem here? For those who can't, he used the wrong word. Danny meant implied. Which allows me to label someone a big, old fuckwit.

The Oxford Compact English Dictionary explains the difference like this:

The words imply and infer do not mean the same thing. Imply is used with a speaker as its subject, as in He implied that the General had been a traitor, and indicates that the speaker is suggesting something though not making an explicit statement. Infer is used in sentences such as We inferred from his words that the General had been a traitor, and indicates that something in the speaker’s words enabled the listeners to deduce that the man was a traitor.

In other words: You say something open to interpretation. What I infer may be different from what you have implied.

Too often now, the word infer is being used to mean imply. And it's just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet it crops up in drama, in news reports, in debates, all over the place.

And it all comes down to the same basic problem: people using words they don't understand just to make themselves sound clever.

We all do it, admittedly, and it's forgivable of some - but not of those who write for a living, those who pride themselves on their command of a language. If in doubt either check your word or find another. A large vocabulary is only worth something as long as one has the ability to use it correctly.

Assuming it was the writer who first used the word inferred in the script, how could this aberration have got past the rest of the cast or crew?

And using the argument that Danny was speaking the sentence in a heated moment doesn't wash: this is a Parliamentary researcher we're talking about, presumably well educated, and one with enough confidence in his facility with English to fancy himself as an MP's speech writer. There's no way he'd have said, "He inferred to me." Just wouldn't happen.

It pains me to dump on Party Animals because I have enjoyed it immensely, and I also find it very hard to find fault with anyone who would involve the always beguiling Raquel Cassidy. So I won't even mention the far worse sin of the erroneous apostrophe visiting the word "says" in a mocked-up newspaper headline.

By the way, for all those wishing to know the score on sleeping one's way to the top, the following episode revealed that Kirsty put out but failed to land the job. At least that's what I inferred.