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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