SUE DE GROOT | Hammer this in with a gavel: they say damages, you ask what’s the damage?

Isn’t it funny how very frequently we don’t notice that a new word has been born — nor, in this case, that an old word is being abominably abused — until someone points it out, and then we suddenly start seeing it everywhere?

Thanks to readers Shelley Childs and Lenina Hassim, who both remarked on how “damages” is constantly and erroneously being used in place of “damage” in South African media outlets, I have a whole new fault line on my radar.

Here are three examples that leapt out at me after the commenters enlightened me:

• “Widespread flooding from Hurricane Ida and power outages on Tuesday slowed efforts by energy companies to assess damages at oil production facilities, ports and refineries.”

• “Moments before, our itinerary featured a kintsugi session. That’s the Japanese practice of fixing broken pottery, usually with gold, highlighting the fractures and in doing so, embracing the damages in the process to restoration.”

• “In his judgment, acting judge Steven Kuny said the PIC was not prevented from pursuing Sassa for damages.”

If you recognised that the last one is the only sentence out of the three above to use “damages” correctly, you get a gold star from the pantheon of pedants.

In the first two examples, the word should have been “damage”, known in linguistic parlance as “an uncountable singular noun”.

The interesting and infuriating thing about these words is that they are mutually exclusive. Damage has no plural and damages has no singular.

Damage happens when buildings are burnt or torn down, when people are injured, when hedgehogs lose their spines and when books are dropped in the bath.

Damages, on the other hand (hands?), is exclusively a legal term that means compensation sought for any wrongs declared by a judge to be wrongful and to have wronged the plaintiff.

This illustrates why English is so confusing. You can claim damages for damage done to your person, property or pocket. Damages might be awarded by the court. Such damages might damage someone else’s pocket but will benefit yours.

Incidentally, in the evergreen TV miniseries The Way We Live Now, adapted in 2001 from Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel of the same name, the nouveau riche daughter of Augustus Melmotte (he is played by the superb David Suchet, better known as Poirot, and she by the disarmingly squeaky-voiced Shirley Henderson) cries “Dommage!” after spilling a beverage on her garish skirts.

When I first saw this, I thought she was shouting about the damage caused to her crinolines, but “dommage” does not mean “damage”. Being French and not of the most high-born upbringing, Marie Melmotte was actually crying “Shame!” in a way not considered polite at the time. (Had this episode taken place in our time, she probably would have yelled a word starting with “f”.)

Damage is never polite, but to replace it with the incorrect word “damages” is nothing short of rude.