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).

Answer came there none. The words “succeed” and “proceed” take a double “e”, while “precede”, “concede”, “accede” (the list goes on) don’t. They all have the same Latin root in the word cedere, which means to go (or yield, or move), and there appears to be no discernible reason for the variation. So it’s one of those things we just have to remember.

Mixed ministers: Talking of preceding and succeeding, we got in a muddle when we pondered whether Liz Truss would take advantage of the annual remittance she is entitled to for having been prime minister (albeit briefly). “The allowance was arranged in the wake of the resignation of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, and announced by her predecessor, John Major, in March the following year,” we wrote, apparently under the impression that Sir John had been PM before Mrs T. It was changed to successor.

“Predecessor” is a funny old word, which when you look at it closely seems to suggest someone who died first, as in “predecease”, though it is more commonly used to mean the previous holder of a job title. According to what is left of my scruffy old Latin dictionary (Longmans “new” edition, published 1895), the most prominent definition of the verb decedere is to depart, which is of course a euphemism for dying. There is half a paragraph of related meanings before it gets to that, though, including “give precedence to”, “get out of the way of”, and “quit one’s province at the expiration of one’s term of office”. Enough said.

First things first: Faithful correspondent Roger Thetford wrote to inform us that we may or may not have made an error in our spelling in a sketch about the Conservative Party’s flirtation with the idea of reinstalling Boris Johnson as PM. “They also evidently don’t care that he will not be able to solve the principle problem they face,” we wrote. It might have scraped through as a double meaning, but it was corrected to “principal” on, well, principle.

A fish called wander: Another of our readers, Iain Boyd, kindly pointed out a second stray homophone, this time in an article about something called catfishing. “In some instances, a catfish may illicit money from their victim,” it said. Sometimes people use the wrong word when they are thinking of the subject they are writing about, which was in this case to do with illegal activity. Nonetheless, what we meant to write was “elicit”. It’s been fixed.

Cast adrift: I thought it might be nice to write about something we had got right, for once, along with all the mistakes, and there was a good example in a news report about the leadership contest (the most recent one, that is), in which we said: “While Mr Sunak sped past the 100-nomination threshold late on Friday, Mr Johnson appeared becalmed on the declared support of a little over half that figure.”

I had to go and look up “becalm” because I didn’t know what it meant, and it turns out that it has nothing to do with not panicking: it means “deprive a ship of the wind it needs to sail”. It conjures rather a nice image of the last prime minister but one, bobbing about on the sea as he waits to be blown along by the breath of the electoral gods, who have decided instead to have a game of Scrabble or something and forgotten all about him. Perfect.