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’.”
