The Way Forward... Ahead: The Crown, Season 5

There is nothing new in the palpable tension between the portrayal of Englishmen in coursebooks (such as the English File and Solutions) and the reality of Britain. The tea-sipping, ever so polite Englishmen are what’s left from the long-forgotten (?) Empire, and such colonial discourses are still all around us teachers and students of ESL.

Nevertheless, the demise of Elisabeth II placed ESL teachers on the horns of a dilemma. May we address the controversies surrounding the Royals, or go on teaching what we were taught to?

The way I see it, The Crown is not only an one-of-a-kind historical drama series with elaborate stage design, but also, a product of imaginative speculation, sheding light on stories that have been either kept secret, or blurred by the nonstop media attention that the royal family suffered since the past century.

The reason I am discussing all this is that there is a scene in the new season of The Crown that I was unable to wrap my head around. The scene revolves around a meeting in Edinburgh, involving the senior members of the royal family and a bunch of lords. The meeting was initiated by the Lord Chamberlain that time, David Ogilvy, and was opened by the late Prince Philip, His Royal Highness.

Why does Prince Philip correct the Lord Chamberlain there?

1. Semantics: little difference

Let’s just first address the white elephant in here: just another metaphor, progress is forward motion along a path.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, forward and ahead both mean in or into the future, and, by extension, are used in expressions related to progress, development, or achievement (cf. a step forward, get ahead, [way] ahead of sy/sg).

The use of the expressions the way ahead and the way ahead, on the other hand, is a whole different issue. Clearly, Prince Philip is strongly opposed to forward here, and truly, he is not forward-thinking at all. Yes, pun intended.

Here, ahead draws the focus onto the way so far, in contrast to forward focusing on the way still to go. After all, His Royal Highness might just want to express his dissatisfaction with the way the Royals are treated those days, in spite of their achievements so far.

No spoiler: they were treated badly. No spoiler: they deserved most of it.

2. Pragmatics: he an old grammar nazi

Given that His Royal Highness in Season 5 tends to remind the viewers of a doddery old man, it wouldn’t surprise us to see him interrupting, correcting people all the time, telling them how to behave, speak, and so on. Were that the case, his interrupting would be, after all, just another symptome of the problem being discussed in the meeting.

Eventually, it mirrors the purist attitude that has appeared in then Prince Charles’s speech about the English language devolving in a worrying degree. Make no mistake: purist is just a fancy word for what we call a grammar nazi in everyday contexts. And may I go out on a limb to say a grammar nazi is to language as a royalist is to society?

What do you make of it? Vote below.