One of the advantages, I suppose that’s debatable, of living in LA is the TV. There are many stations, and some of them have very odd programming. Except for the cable cartoon channels I don’t think that any of them are deliberately trying to be odd. It just sort of happens.

The less affluent PBS stations tend to have some very low budget documentaries – “Teaching Cursive Writing to Your Students !!” – and the PBS current events shows. However, the talking heads shows are always running about a week behind the air date on the more affluent PBS stations, and at very stranges times of the day and/or night. The other night I fell asleep on the couch, again, and when I awoke there was this current events show chugging away on the screen. Through very spotty reception, I still don’t have cable, a roundtable of experienced and knowledgable political commentators were discussing the current US primaries.

So one of these experts was delivering what seems to be her standard speech on Hilary Clinton. The jist of this is that whilst Hilary thought her nomination was inevitable, the Democratic voters don’t quite see it that way, and are demanding actual functioning primaries in which the candidate will be chosen.

All very good, but then to drive the point home she said, Democratic voters said, “Stop! We want a say in the nomination of our party’s candidate. We don’t want to stand idly by while someone is coronated.”

CORONATED? This is an expert who is supposed to use words for a living. CORONATED? So I turned to my trusty dictionary, and the appropriate noun would be coronation. As in “We don’t want to stand idly by while someone has a coronation.” The correct verb would be crowned. As in “We don’t want to stand idly by while someone is crowned.”

Although maybe we’re just fighting a futile rearguard action here. Like those folks who still object to Disrepect as a verb (Are you disrespecting me?) or Flamable to indicate that something is inflamable.

Comment RSS -