[First, an almost public service announcement. The film adaptation of the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has opened in cinemas in Britain and Israel – and quite possibly elsewhere that I don’t know about. Early reviews have been largely very positive. Bernice and I plan to see it this week, but I already know I shall be in tears long before the end. While I can’t quite give a personal recommendation yet, I can tell you neither of the two leads – Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton – is capable of giving a bad performance. In addition, the film stars the English countryside at its finest, which, alone, is surely worth the price of admission. As if that were not enough, one of the co-producers is my cousin, and I can assure you that if she is satisfied with the film then you are very unlikely to be disappointed.]

Under normal circumstances, nobody’s mind is broader than mine when it comes to questions of British and American English usage. I will often be found manning the barricades in defence of ‘defense’. I once even dived into very choppy waters to argue for the legitimacy of ‘dove’. When I discovered only a few weeks ago that a ‘jumper’ is understood by Americans to be a pinafore dress rather than a sweater, I didn’t jump, or even break into a sweat. I have spent many hours explaining to pedants that the English language is not the private property of the British, and that there is no single ‘correct English’, but, rather, a variety of correct Englishes.

However (you must have felt a ‘however’ looming up, surely; you probably even heard those staccato strings that warn you it actually isn’t safe to go back into the water), however, as I say, there are just one or two American usages that (and you might feel this is illogical and inconsistent) stick in my craw. I’m not proud of this (well, not usually), but I thought I would explore one with you today. This particular usage is eminently timely to visit in this of all weeks. Indeed, this past week has been more or less the first legitimate opportunity for 70 years.

I first encountered ‘coronate’ as a verb a year or so ago, on the lips of an American rabbi whose lecture series I subscribed to. While he was extremely erudite and eloquent, there were a number of words that he mispronounced. I suspected that this was because he had only ever read them in books, and never heard them spoken aloud. This probably reflected the fact that most of his formal education was within the Jewish world, and his considerable secular knowledge was gained primarily from reading. I was reminded of the passage in Richard Llewellyn’s novel about a South Wales mining community, How Green Was My Valley, in which the narrator recalls how as a sensitive and academic young boy he was humiliated by his teacher for pronouncing ‘misled’ as ‘mizzled’, having only encountered it in his reading. The irony there, of course, is that having, as a young child, a reading vocabulary that exceeds your listening vocabulary is probably something to be admired, rather than mocked.

(Incidentally, in trying to find the actual text of that extract from the book, I stumbled across the fact that although Richard Llewellyn always claimed to be a miner’s son born in St David’s who worked down the pits at Gilfach Goch, where his novel was set, he was, in truth, born in Hendon, London, the son of a publican, and didn’t go near Wales until he became famous. You can read the whole sorry story here.)

As so often happens in this world of coincidence, within a week of hearing the original rabbi speak of kings being coronated, I heard two other Americans commit what I was starting to realise I could not simply dismiss as an error. A little research was sufficient to establish that ‘to coronate’ is a verb used in modern American usage even more often than ‘to crown’.

At this stage, I reached for my trusty Complete Oxford English Dictionary, to discover, as I already suspected I would, that the first recorded usage of ‘coronate’ as a verb was in 1603, which means that this is something that the Pilgrim Fathers stowed away in the hold of The Mayflower as a neologism (‘to crown’ having been used in English since 1175). As with so many other words, usage diverged over the years in an America and a Britain that had relatively little day-to-day interaction with each other for 200 years, the Americans favouring ‘coronate’ and the British ‘crown’.

I think that what I find unpalatable in this particular American usage is that it prefers the longer, more formal, Latinate word to the shorter, more homely, Anglo-Saxon one. Even as I type this, I realise how inconsistent I am being, since, when I turn from the verb to the noun, I far prefer Johnny-come-lately Latinate ‘coronation’ (1388) to Anglo-Saxon ‘crowning’ (1240). All I can say in my defence is that the noun represents the whole shebang: the entire two-hour ceremony in Westminster Abbey, in front of a congregation of 2,200, plus the journey back to the Palace, accompanied by 4,000 service personnel, along a route lined by an additional 1,000 service personnel and tens of thousands of spectators, a domestic viewing audience of 20 million and a global audience of 300 million. I feel that warrants a Latinate, formal noun.

To crown the King, on the other hand, is to gingerly place the 2.08-kilogram St Edward’s Crown on the royal head, to jiggle it a little, and carefully centre the subtle mark added to avoid what happened at Elizabeth’s coronation, when the Archbishop of Canterbury apparently placed the crown back-to-front on her head. To crown the King is a simple physical act involving just two people. It seems to me appropriate that the simple action be captured in a simple word.

I can’t actually remember the last coronation, although our family was one of the many in Britain that bought their first television set especially for the occasion, and I assume I watched it, aged almost three-and-a-half, together with over 20 million others in the UK. It is estimated that an average of 17 people were gathered round the nine-inch screen of each TV set in Britain, making even watching the event on TV a communal act.

Bernice and I both felt that, having failed to pay much attention last time, we really ought to watch this time, and so, on Saturday night, we sat down to watch the Coronation of the Day highlights from the BBC. After 10 minutes of some rather-too-precious pre-match talking heads, we switched to the unedited coverage, and judiciously used the fast forward at strategic moments. This meant that we may have missed one or two unscripted moments, but we certainly got a sense of the whole extraordinary sweep.

At this point in the post, I planned to offer a critique of the coronation as an event. However, as I started to write, I found that I was doing little more than rehashing the old familiar arguments for and against the monarchy while at the same time making a few cheap jokes that seemed to me to jar with the awe and solemnity with which King Charles himself clearly faced the day. So let me just say that whether you view the elaborateness of the ceremony, and the extraordinary names and arcane symbolism of its various elements, as preposterous or profoundly moving almost certainly says more about you than about them. The simple fact is that Charles became the 40^th monarch to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, in a line going back 957 years, to 1066. The major elements of the coronation ceremony have remained unchanged for over 600 years. You may find that ridiculous; you may find it inspiring. You can probably guess which side of that argument I am basically on, but I won’t bore you further.

Meanwhile, in our own personal dynasty, No 2 is trying out the throne, No 1’s gaze is on higher things, and No 3 didn’t even turn up this week. Thus it is in most families, I suspect.