• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Coronated

G

Gill

Nordic Pine
Joined
Sep 18, 2015
Messages
511
Reaction score
90
Location
East Lindsey
I keep hearing media experts and even journalists talking about Andy Burnham being ‘coronated’ as PM if he wins the Makerfield by-election. Apparently it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary but I still think ‘crowned’ is the word they should be using. Am I alone in finding this incredibly irritating?
 
A quick search found the following

1. Royal Monarchs
In a literal sense, it describes the public act or ceremony of installing a new king or queen. [1, 2]
  • Example: "King Charles was coronated at Westminster Abbey."
  • Note: While widely used, traditional language experts and dictionaries prefer the verb "to crown," as "coronated" is a recent backward-formation from the noun "coronation". [1, 2]

2. Metaphorical Use
It is frequently used figuratively in politics or sports to describe someone who is chosen or designated as the undisputed leader or victor, often without a formal election or challenge. [1, 2]
  • Example: "After winning the first three primary races, the candidate was practically coronated as the party's nominee."
 
It's crowned, for goodness sake. We certainly have coronations, but monarchs are crowned. Obviously, it's the fault of the American destruction of our language! Phil's example shows that, as it refers to US primary elections. Carruthers has passed out on the floor, suffering from an apoplectic fit. Much as he'd like to, he can't flog every American with stinging nettles, no matter how much their behaviour demands it.
 
Poor Carruthers would be equally horrified to see what is happening to the english language here, where, for example, the plural of sandwich (le sandwich) becomes les sandwichs.
 
Mike G said:
Yep, that makes my point. That's an American dictionary......so it's full of makey-uppie words and mis-spellings. :)
Click to expand...
To be fair, 1623 was rather a long time before the first American dictionary was even written (1806 I think).

The OED agrees with the 1623 date & puts it as being from an Englishman:

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/coronate_v?tl=true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cockeram

(I also hate the word but then I'm a grumpy so-and-so who also disliked @AndyP's "I do not disagree" as an alternative to "I agree" :) )
 
Long live Gower's "Complete plain words". Most excellent tome. Explicatory, concise, appropriate, grammatically correct.

That said, neologisms have long been acceptable; try Alice in Wonderland for example. But the grammatical travesties served up betimes? Yuk.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top