Grayson Perry’s “coruscating repartee”, a silky head of hair used to “coruscating effect”, and a “coruscating verdict” expected from the privileges committee. Which one of these references from the Observer over the summer prompted a reader to cry foul? Surely, “excoriating” was meant, he said. “Perhaps you could correct it and add it to the Guardian and Observer style guide.”
In early June, the imminent verdict on whether the former prime minister Boris Johnson had misled parliament about gatherings at 10 Downing Street during the pandemic was unlikely to be glittering, so I had halfway reached for the digital red pen to make an amendment. “Coruscating” was, as far as I knew, already in the style guide. The entry I had last read went as follows: “[It] means sparkling, or emitting flashes of light; people seem to think, wrongly, that it means the same as excoriating, censuring severely, eg ‘a coruscating attack on Clegg’s advisers’.”
Then I paused to check, and found the guidance missing. Clearly, I had not been paying attention, as it was deleted in 2022. It seems that sufficient doubt had crept in after a secondary definition appeared in the Oxford Dictionary of English: “Severely critical; scathing”. Conversations with the style team suggest its removal was not so much an endorsement of the new usage as a view that retaining the entry was a bit too hardline.
The word comes from the Latin “coruscāre”; to flash or vibrate. And it has been used to mean sparkling or glittering since at least the early 18th century, with its figurative use following a little later. But language is a living thing, subject to semantic change. Take “pretty”, which started out as “crafty” or “cunning”. The Guardian journalist David Shariatmadari reminds us in his book Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language: “A word’s origins do not reveal its underlying meanings.” He gives another entertaining example, “toilet”, quoting the linguist Elizabeth Closs Traugott’s explanation that its first meaning in English was a “piece of cloth, often used as a wrapper, especially of clothes”. It travelled via several other meanings before taking its current seat.
So far, the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE), with its remit to analyse and describe language as it is actually used, appears to be the only authority to give the fresh definition of coruscating, and I asked its publisher, Oxford University Press, to tell me more. “Like any other new word or sense, ‘coruscate’ to mean ‘scathing’ has become established through increasingly frequent use over a period of some years,” replied Michael Proffitt, chief editor at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), where collected evidence shows this usage going back to at least to 1995. The new definition was added to the ODE, a stablemate of the OED, in 2017.
“It is fair to say that it’s controversial with some who regard it as an error, and it’s possible, or perhaps even likely, that this sense originated in a contextual misunderstanding of the word in its older sense … That said, all meanings fix or change through sustained usage rather than any specific view on what’s right or wrong.”
Proffitt indicated that the definition would be added to the august OED at the next opportunity. “The reason the later sense doesn’t yet appear in OED is simply that we haven’t yet updated that entry. When we do, the team will be able to research in more detail when and where the new meaning emerged, and will decide on whether to add a comment on controversy or confusion surrounding its use.”
Semantic shift occurs for a number of reasons (I’m told this one would come under the linguistic category of “broadening”) and, while it can happen to fill a gap in vocabulary, Grant Barrett, head of lexicography at Dictionary.com and co-host of the US radio show A Way with Words, pointed out that – as with the new use of coruscating – the existence of other words that already do the same job is no barrier to entry: “English is rife with synonyms,” he said.
In the case of “coruscating”, Barrett noted it has long been applied figuratively to describe compelling speech or rhetoric. Rhetoric in turn can be positive or negative, and a new usage thus settled on the latter. He also agreed it was possible that to some ears the word simply has a caustic sound to it. Dictionary.com, which was previously in partnership with OUP in the Lexico website, does not have a second definition on its website, but Barrett confirms it is “one of thousands of new words and meanings” being tracked in its database.
Back in 2008, David Marsh, then editor of the Guardian’s style guide, wrote a spirited article on the skilful work of subeditors. He ended by saying: “In short, they are the people who know what ‘coruscating’ means.” He was right at the time, but today that article itself (which contained a broadside against the writer Giles Coren, who had recently berated a Times subeditor) could well be described as coruscating in the old and new sense.
Both Proffitt and Barrett noted the potential for ambiguity that the negative definition brings. To give some examples from Guardian and Observer articles in recent years, it would be clear what was meant by a “coruscating riviera setting”, but a “coruscating letter”? And if the new meaning gains greater currency would the writer’s compliment to Grayson Perry be wrongly inferred as criticism?
So how should we approach claims of error in the midst of this shift? Collins Dictionary, which in the absence of style guidance is the Guardian and Observer’s default reference, offers only the traditional definition and the publisher did not respond to a request for comment on the new usage. Until now, we have been routinely making a “correction” whenever readers alert us to a suspicious appearance. The style committee will decide on any guidance, but my suggestion is to avoid the negative usage – as with the verb “sanction” – whenever it could cause readers uncertainty. But, in context, it was clear what was meant by a coruscating verdict on Johnson, so I left that one be.
It occurred to me that some people might be more vexed about a semantic shift when it arises from a seeming misunderstanding rather than a slow morphing. But Barrett saw no cause for consternation. “Change is normal. It’s interesting,” he said. “Be excited that you caught change as it was happening.”
• Elisabeth Ribbans is the Guardian and Observer’s global readers’ editor
