The ‘crown’ jewels in “coronate”

Tap, tap. Hello! Is this thing still on? 

Feedback squeals.

Clears throat. “Hi, everyone! Or, uh, anyone.” 

Man from the back of the dimly lit, empty room, back facing me and seated on a folding chair, hunched over: “Oh, I’m just charging my phone at this outlet over here. Don’t mind me.”

It’s been over two and a half years since my last post. OK, this is already sounding like I’m giving a Catholic confession. Bless me, Reader, for I have sinned. It’s been over two and half years since my last post…

Sorry, I didn’t expect to be riffing so fast. But just as you can’t take the Catholic schoolboy out of this adult, so a good friend of mine texted the other day: “You can take the radish out of the mashed, but you can’t take the mashed out of the radish.”

I’m not exactly sure what this means, buddy, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it. No, no. I know exactly what it means, and I feel it. Deeply. 

My work has undergone a lot of changes since 2018, when I stopped my regular blogging after many years. And I’m undergoing a time of change now—change that, after some serious soul-searching, takes me back here.

Change that takes me back to my “roots.” Perhaps I’ll share more on that change in a separate post soon. 

Let’s hit the fast-forward button a few times now, shall we?

Why was it just recently that my friend happened to comment on my old etymology brand? Well, in that same text thread, he joked: “Back-formation of the month has to be ‘coronate,’ right?”

I already had a reply ready to go. And I had that reply because I heard the host of a podcast—also observing, like my friend, the prevalence of coronate in the recent popular discourse about the US presidential race—muse if the word was really a word or just some newfangled contrivance. 

Duty called. I emailed him with a version of the following word-splaining.

What is the origin of “coronate”?

Coronate is very much a real word. And it’s not, technically, a back-formation, which is a word formed from an existing word from which it appears derived, typically by removing a suffix. More on back-formations below.

• We have written evidence for coronate since at least 1623 according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). 
• It comes from the Latin verb coronare (or a form of it), meaning “to crown, wreathe,” from the noun corona, meaning “crown” or “garland.”
• Yes, the corona during a total eclipse is directly from this same noun.
• Passing through French, the Latin corona also gives us English’s very own crown. So did it, ultimately, give us the word coroner; that job title originally referred to someone charged with protecting the property of the royal family, or “crown” by a metaphor we still use today. 
• And a corolla? That’s literally a “little crown,” from a diminutive form of corona. (I once wrote a poem featuring the word corolla, and my mentor said, rightfully, he couldn’t help but think of the car.)
• The noun coronation is indeed documented quite earlier; the OED cites evidence as early as 1388. Coronation also comes, through a derived noun form, from the Latin verb coronare.

You wouldn’t be off base to suspect what is called “back formation,” which is a common mechanism of new word formation in English. Edit was formed from editor, though you would think that edit came first and editor was formed based on it. Sightsee was formed from sightseeing. Legislate was formed from legislator. Burgle was formed from burglar. (Isn’t burgle just a whimsical specimen, just a genuine lil spanker, of a word?!) 

You would also be right to notice coronate with sudden saliency. There’s no doubt a way—really, it seems to me a kind of emergent phenomenon—in which a particular word appears to “go viral” in our discourse, especially as captured in headlines and media titles. But we must always be wary of what Arnold Zwicky dubbed the “recency illusion,” or the belief that a term is newer than it actually is because one has only started to notice—not to mention the “frequency illusion,” which concerns believing it’s more widespread.

Let’s talk “conversate”

Many of us likely have conversate in mind on this matter of back formations, and it’s worth some attention. 

Conversate is also very much a real word—and it is indeed a back-formation from conversation. It is also labeled by dictionaries variously as “colloquial” or “non-standard.” (Those labels themselves come with some baggage, because, as dictionary editors know and care well themselves, conversate is associated with Black English, which has long been wrongly marginalized as, well, wrong.)

And, as these things always go, conversate is older than you think, evidenced since the early 1800s in its sense of “having a conversation.” In the interest of thoroughness, the OED also attests a conversate around the 1570s in a sense of “associating or being familiar with.”

Coronal associations?

I’ll close now that you should take a close look at the logo for Corona, the Mexican beer brand.  It’s a crown; corona is “crown” in Spanish and, of course, is directly derived from Latin’s corona.

With all the events in the past several weeks in the US presidential race, I suspect many people have taken to cracking open a cold Corona to help them take the edge off these summer days.

Cheers. It’s good to be back, and I plan on doing more here soon.