The
writer’s armoury has a red door in the corner with a black skull and
crossbones stencilled on it, behind which we keep a select array of showoffy
Latinate words. Nothing wrong with that,
as long as they’re used with discernment for rare surgical strikes. All too
often, though, writers scatter them around willy-nilly, like landmines in a
potato field.
The
adjective coruscating, that favourite
of arts reviewers keen for the reader not to twig that they have
nothing at all to say, is one such – or it would be, if most of those who deploy
it actually knew what the damned thing meant. But I’ll come to that. Even on
the rare occasion when coruscating is
used properly, what’s the point? It’s no smart bomb; it’s surplus materiel — an
unnecessary, character-wasteful synonym for sparkling,
gleaming or just good old no-nonsense shiny. Even if
you’re tempted to use it because you’re convinced that only a showoffy Latinate
word will adequately fill a particular hole in a text you’re writing, then scintillating or incandescent should serve your purpose well enough.
But that’s not how I see people using
it at all. Instead, they use it to mean acerbic,
mordant or edgy. What are they thinking? I imagine that what they're thinking goes something like this. “Coruscating has got cor– in it. Excoriating and corrosive have
got cor– in them too. Therefore, showoffy
Latinate words with cor– in them always
refer to astringent, exfoliating, ominously-smoking-dollop-of-KY-Jellyish-gloop-drooled-sulphurically-in-an-Alien-film, paint-strippy sorts of things.”
A check of recent uses of coruscating in British newspapers confirms the impression that I’ve had
for a while: writers, even professional ones whose copy is subedited, don’t
just balls it up often, they balls it up more often than not. What was the exception
is the new rule. The cause is lost.
The adjective coruscating has become what American copy-editors — when faced with enervate, decimate, bemused, beg the question or any other word or expression
that too many people think means something other than what it’s supposed to
mean (hi, misogynist!) — call "skunked”.
It's stained, it stinks and it's irrecoverably spoiled. There's only one thing for it: throw it away.
