‘Yes, the post never comes till two now,’ said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn’t been listening to what I’d been saying, and by implication that what I had been saying was boring. So then I read out something to make him laugh, which I’ll come to later.
But the occasion for my original remark was that someone on the wireless had just said, ‘That’s a post facto justification.’ I had merely observed that it isn’t post facto but post factum, since ‘post’ takes the accusative, not the ablative. The reason it is so often wrong is because of a confusion with the phrase ex post facto, used by our learned friends in the phrase ‘ex post facto law’, implying retrospective force. The Oxford English Dictionary makes it two words, ex postfacto, pointing out that ‘the separation of postfacto in current spelling is erroneous’.
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