Mea Culpa: Winds of change

Susanna Richards rounds up last week’s errors and omissions

A disappointed prime-ministerial candidate is rowed gently back to shore (Getty/iStock)

In a news article on Monday anticipating the announcement of our latest prime minister, we said: “Mr Sunak could be coronated PM today if his rival Penny Mordaunt fails to reach the threshold.”

“Coronated” is an interesting word to use in this context. It did once mean the same thing as crowned, apparently: the Oxford dictionary provides a citation from 1513 that reads “William conquerour … was coronate at London,” and it appears to have been quite a popular term in the following centuries. But it seems more likely, as reader Paul Edwards noted, to have occurred as a back-formation of “coronation”. Either way, the writer thought better of it and changed it.

Precede with caution: Another article gave an account of previous prime ministers who had returned to office after leaving it, noting that Robert Cecil (1830-1903) had been “preceeded and succeeded by William Gladstone” in two of his stints as PM (Gladstone was another one who wouldn’t go away, it seems: he held the role four times between 1868 and 1894). Adding to the joy of this tale of head-of-government hokey-cokey was the misspelling of “preceded”, which set me off on a hunt to find out why we spell it with one “e” (well, one “e” at a time).