Date:15/07/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/07/15/stories/2008071555230900.htm

Opinion - News Analysis

Corrections and clarifications

In an article “Parsing the India-specific safeguards agreement” (Editorial page, July 12, 2008), a sentence in the second paragraph was “The bulk of the technical aspects of the [IAEA] document — especially on safeguards procedures — with one or two important exceptions is virtually a carbon copy of the provisions found in the Agency’s template document for site-specific safeguards in a non-nuclear weapon state (Infcirc 66/Rev.2).” Siddharth Varadarajan clarifies that it is the template for states which are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The heading of a report was “Rules soon to regulate infertility clinics” (July 11, 2008), while the text had references to “infertility clinics”. It should have been “infertility treatment clinics”!

In “What’s in store now?” (Editorial, July 10, 2008), a sentence in the second paragraph was “Right now, Congress political managers are counting on Mr. Mulayam Singh and Mr. Amar Singh, in the company of some fence-sitting small parties and independents, to bale out the Manmohan Singh government.”

The second paragraph in an article “Let us not lose sight of good governance” (Op-Ed, July 10, 2008) was “Also, just because the Samajwadi Party has decided to bail out the United Progressive Alliance government does not mean that all the aberrations and absurdities of the party and its leaders stand dignified.” There were a number of queries on the two usages.

The Independent (London), in an article on April 23, 2005, titled “Errors and Omissions: Be careful when rabbiting about rodents”, says: “Both ‘bail out’ and ‘bale out’ are concerned with people escaping from tight corners, but their meanings are quite different. What it comes down to is this: if you are rescuing someone from a nasty predicament, you are bailing them out; if you are yourself escaping from a nasty predicament before it gets worse, you are baling out. So an investor who sells a stock because its value is falling is baling out. (If somebody comes along and bails out the company and the stock rises, the investor may later regret the decision to bale out.)”

The current position is that when the idea concerns escaping from some potentially difficult situation, American English virtually always uses bail out, perhaps under the influence of the legal sense of bail. British English seems to be divided about 50:50 between that and bale out, and it’s easy to find examples of baled out in the English press.

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