A lecturer at a new university proposed that wayward undergraduate spellings be accepted as “variants” rather than mistakes. Times readers are unlikely to allow this newspaper similar latitude. We published a story last week about a fantasist who had worn a huge collection of military medals to a Remembrance Day parade. Listing the medals, we said of one: “Awarded to some British personnel but not allowed to be worn publically.”
The spelling “publically” is so widespread that spellchecking software accepts it. The word is not “publically” but “publicly”. (While the errant spelling appeared in the online version, our print edition carried the right spelling. I omitted to inform my colleagues of the discrepancy, just so that I ccould get a column out of it.) Why is “publically” wrong?
Consistency will get you only so far. You might argue that the adjective is “public” and not “publical”, so the adverb ought to be “publicly”. By contrast, the adjective “economical” (as well as “economic”) does exist, and the adverb is properly spelt “economically”. Likewise, the adjective “magical” is in common use and the adverb is “magically”. But this line of reasoning is easily refuted. There is no such word as “barbarical”: the correct adjective is “barbaric”. Yet the adverb is “barbarically”.
There is no strict logic to it, but always write “publicly” and protest vigorously if you see “publically”. A New York Times columnist commented last week that the Senate Majority leader had “not seen his support from his Democratic colleagues or the administration slip publically”, and got it as wrong as we did. There are many American variants in English usage, but “publically” isn’t one of them.
I note this misspelling because it’s common. There are others that are less frequent but still important to get right. Here is the journalist Beatrix Campbell writing in The Guardian: “As we emerge from these conferences in the midst of a global economic tsunami, we are reminded of the idiosyncracy of English politics.” That was no typo, for here is Campbell again: “But then these debates always arise from idiosyncracy, ambiguity and uncertainty. . . .”
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The word is “idiosyncrasy”. Some writers misspell it because they imagine it is like “democracy” or “autocracy”. But the derivation is different.
Idiosyncrasy comes from the Greek “crasis”, meaning mix. Democracy and autocracy come from “kratos”, meaning power. To confuse the endings is to show indifference to political history and not just language.