The words in which Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, expressed his historic opinion about withdrawing British forces from Iraq were of some interest. ‘We should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem.’ Or was it, as many papers reported ‘sometime soon’? Aurally there is no distinction between some time and sometime, and while it is the accepted convention to spell it as one word in the slightly pompous usage of ‘sometime mayor of Eastbourne’, I have been a little annoyed lately by the running together otherwise of some and time.
A glance at the historically arranged Oxford English Dictionary shows that some time has been written indifferently as one or two words for centuries. Chaucer, or his scribe, may have written, ‘Thou mayst to thy desir som tym atayne’, but William Dunbar (he of the ‘Lament for the Malaris’) a century later wrote, ‘Suppois the servand be lang unquit/ The lord sumtyme reward wil it.
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