Grammar Moses: My folks, they taught me 'coronate' is not a word

Pronouns were given to us as contractions were given to us: to save time and, in the written form, space.

Yet we hear variations of these sentences every day: "Hillary, she lies more than any other politician in the history of the known universe." Or "Donald Trump, he will plunge us into World War III with that tongue of his."

I'm not here to dissect the logic of either sentence but rather the unnecessary use of a pronoun right after the noun it describes.

"I sent you an email a while ago containing a gripe about using a pronoun immediately after a noun, rather than using the verb after the noun, where it seems to belong," wrote Jackie Geisler of Palatine.

She clipped to her snail mail a Daily Herald caption that begins: "Experts they're surprised by the number of uses of XYZ."

I do appreciate Jackie's point. People do waste their breath by inserting a pronoun in these cases.

However, such was not the case with our caption. Someone merely inadvertently omitted the verb. It should have read: "Experts say they're surprised ..."

Coronated

I've kept a handwritten letter from Ann Callaway of Gurnee on top of my computer for seven months, and there is no use waiting any longer for Queen Elizabeth to abdicate to one of the grandkids so this item can have a time peg.

Ann wrote: "'Coronated', as in 'The King was coronated at the abbey last week,' I guess is a conflation of 'coronation' and 'crowned.' I've seen plenty of weird and ungrammatical things but not (till recently) 'coronated.'"

This is what is called a back-formation. One is formed by deleting the suffix from a word to create a new word. So, "coronation" becomes "coronate."

There are plenty of back-formations that have become generally accepted: "evaluate" from "evaluation"; "cohabitate" from "cohabitation" (the word you're reaching for is "cohabit"); "incent" from "incentive"; "kidnap" from "kidnapper"; "bartend" from "bartender."

For whatever reason, I despise "bartend." One tends bar.

But "coronate" is not among those accepted back-formations.

"Crowned" does the job nicely.

Stating the obvious

I was listening to a network radio broadcast on my way to work, and on came a story about remote-controlled underwater drones and all of the cool things they can do.

A drone, by definition, is controlled remotely. By including that in the description you might lead one to think there is a manned - or chimped - variety of drone.

A co-worker popped his head in my office to tell me about a two-man submersible submarine, and he probably could tell from the look on my face that he'd end up in this column.

"It wouldn't be much of a submarine if it weren't submersible," I replied.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.