Italians always say the same thing when events like this unfold on their television screens. “The English,” they effuse, “it’s only the English who know how to do it.”  The event in question was, in this case, the Coronation of King Charles III, but I’d heard the phrase and observed the facial expression that accompanies it on many a past occasion – funerals, weddings, and whatnot.

Our times reverberate with observations, which are just as often laments, of the ubiquity of certain objects and modes of deportment with which these are associated.  I doubt that the umbrella and the bicycle caused as much speculation about the future of the world as the smartphone and the electric scooter do at present, though I recall that a New York Times editorial once condemned the word “automobile” as a neologism combining Greek and Latin roots “which is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation.”

The English language does not seem to have a single word for “old age,” which exists, for instance, in Russian (starost’) and Italian (vecchiaia).  A native speaker can easily spend days or years pondering this lacuna because, whatever its significance, it is significant.  We do not say “young age,” we say “youth,” and at once there opens a very specific psychological and ethical panorama.  None such exists for youth’s antonym, suggesting that language itself does not so much as bother looking in this direction. Yet how can there be night without twilight?