There it was, in a serious editorial, in Britain's grandest newspaper: "the proper way to investigate past failures... is not to become publically credulous". Publically? Why would The Times publicly display such an inability to spell? Past editors must be turning in their graves.
There may be a reason: that paper's column on language has defended publically. The column is curiously headed "The Pedant"- as its writer once was, until he had what Christians call a Pauline conversion, and like many converts moved from one extreme to the other. His column would now be better named "The Freethinker".
I recollect watching the change in his column, indeed mentioned it in mine. At first, approvingly. Real pedants object to verbless sentences like that one. They hate 'split infinitives as in, say, to boldly go. Yet both, though rare, are at times justifiable, even necessary, whatever pedants (or exam-markers) may think. If I'd written above that The Times chose to publicly display, rather than publicly to or display publicly, I could defend it. And there are pseudo-pedantries worse than that: the assertion that no sentence, let alone paragraph, may begin with And or But, for example. That's not even pedantry, it's tosh. But grammar or style are one thing, spelling is another. Apart from the familiar transatlantic differences, or the choice between -ise and - ize, there are few spellings that educated users of English can reasonably disagree about. And publicly isn't one of them.
A little history here. Most of our adjectives ending in - ic began life in the ancient Greek ending in -ikos. The Romans took over some of these bodily, merely turning - ikos into -icus. But often they latinized them into - icalis. And that is where some oddities of English began.
We have lots of - ic adjectives, lots of -ical ones. Sometimes one root word has both forms, maybe with different meanings: for example, economic and economical. But - here's the oddity - to turn these adjectives into adverbs, we most often use - ically for all of them, even when no -ical form exists. Basic, for example, becomes basically - though we pronounce this as basicly.
That's the general rule, witness any list of words like caustic, democratic, or pathetic. But public is an exception. Its adverb is publicly. True, publically did once exist. But it died long ago. And what counts - with spelling as with grammar or with word-meanings - is what people use today. So how could The Times's man defend publically? He cited another Briton's lament that that spelling "has become widespread". He agreed that it has become common, but argued from that very (supposed) fact that publically is merely a "variant" spelling, not a misspelling.
Fair enough - if the "fact" were true. But it isn't. Both men were relying on bogus evidence. Publically is not common, it's very rare. I've met publicly thousands of times, and maybe 50-100 times in the six months since the column at issue; publically hardly ever, even in recent years, and not once again in those six months until now.
And this isn't a trivial issue of the spelling of one word or the views of one columnist (or indeed two). The bedrock of any serious discussion of current English is what people actually write or say. People - and people today, not long-dead ones, however famous; not grammarians, not pedants. But not illiterates, not dyslexics or bad typists or folk who just can't be bothered. Modern dictionaries and textbooks record much rare and/or disputable usage, because their editors, unlike older ones, aim to describe how language is used, not to prescribe how it ought to be. But that doesn't mean that "ought" has no place in the discussion. And if we want to know what's correct and what's not - or what's in between - we must start from the facts, not convenient fictions.
