Toby Young Toby Young

What is this word?

issue 23 March 2013

‘What are you writing?’ I asked my nine-year-old daughter as she sat at the kitchen table doing her homework.

‘A recount,’ she said.

‘What’s a recount?’

She looked at me with utter disdain. ‘Duh! A recount.’

I calmly explained that you could recount an event in a piece of writing, but that didn’t make what you’d written a ‘recount’. The only sense in which you can use ‘recount’ as a noun is when referring to the act of recounting something.

‘What’s this then?’ she said, waving a piece of paper in my face. Sure enough, the exercise she’d been given by her teacher was to write a ‘recount’ of something that had happened to her the previous week.

‘It’s a mistake,’ I explained. ‘He’s mixing up ‘report’ and ‘account’.’

She shook her head with disbelief. Was I really that stupid? She then produced another piece of homework, this one written by my eight-year-old son.

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