He also agreed it was possible that to some ears the word simply has a caustic sound to it. Rhetoric in turn can be positive or negative, and a new usage thus settled on the latter. In the case of “coruscating”, Barrett noted it has long been applied figuratively to describe compelling speech or rhetoric. 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 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. 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.” “The reason the later sense doesn’t yet appear in OED is simply that we haven’t yet updated that entry. Proffitt indicated that the definition would be added to the august OED at the next opportunity. “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.” The new definition was added to the ODE, a stablemate of the OED, in 2017. “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. 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. It travelled via several other meanings before taking its current seat. 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”. Take “pretty”, which started out as “crafty” or “cunning”. But language is a living thing, subject to semantic change. 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. The word comes from the Latin “ coruscāre” to flash or vibrate. 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. It seems that sufficient doubt had crept in after a secondary definition appeared in the Oxford Dictionary of English: “Severely critical scathing”. Clearly, I had not been paying attention, as it was deleted in 2022. Then I paused to check, and found the guidance missing.
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