Taking the shine off "coruscate"

John McIntyre’s current word of the week is coruscating -- literally "flashing, sparkling, glittering," and metaphorically, per American Heritage, "exhibit[ing] sparkling virtuosity."

But do we have a consensus on that? I've had coruscating on my watch list for a while, and I think it may be shifting its sense in a way that the dictionaries haven't yet recognized, though they surely have active files on the case. 

The thing is, coruscating is supposed to be complimentary, but sometimes it's obvious the writer doesn't mean it that way. Instead, it's a negative,  apparently meaning "corrosive, harrowing, scathing, excoriating, castigating," or the like. For example:

The poem ... is a coruscating portrait of her father as a dead weight on her mother's psyche. (New York Times, Nov. 8, 2012,  in a review of a book called "brutal and sorrow-filled.")

In his concession speech, Romney showed he had heard the message. He called for renewed bipartisanship, an end to coruscating political divisions. But the Republican hard men still don't get it. (Guardian, Nov. 7, 2012)  

One of the peculiarities of modern conservatism is that the most coruscating examinations of its doctrines are often issued from dissidents within its own ranks. (NYT, March 2, 2012).

Entwistle's early lack of leadership and gravitas led to coruscating attacks from media commentators. (Independent, Oct. 29, 2012)  

And though coruscate is listed as an intransitive verb, a few writers have coined an adjectival coruscated, which might mean anything, but seems unlikely to mean "sparkling" here: 

He slathered the walls with coruscated layers of paint and clay. (Observer, Oct. 28, 2012)

You close ''Don Quixote'' and ''Tristram Shandy,'' ''Middlemarch'' and ''Augie March,'' and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before. (NYT, Aug. 19, 2012)

I suspect, after poking around the newspaper archives, that the change is more advanced in the English press; they like to call critical official reports "coruscating," and you know they can't mean  sparkling. So what's going on in your linguistic neighborhood? Does coruscate still shine for you, or are the lights going dim?


Update 12/13/12: I see that Ruth Walker, whose language posts at the Christian Science Monitor are (sadly) not all that easy to find, wrote about coruscate last year, and mentioned the "corrosive" connection:

This writer [on a website of the University of Hull] goes on to say, however, that people often use the word to mean "very hostile" or "savage," and suggests that the word they are reaching for but not quite finding is excoriate … Corrosive may be another word writers have in mind when they use the nonsparkly coruscating.

She also sums up why it’s so easy to spread a new sense.

When a 50-cent adjective like coruscating appears in a sentence where it's not essential to meaning, readers are freer to draw their own inferences. In this case, the two meanings are very different, but in any given context, each is likely to be plausible. Readers then use the word themselves in the meaning they have inferred.

Sure, a dictionary would help -- but we don't learn most words from dictionaries, and until someone throws a warning flag, the person using the word has no reason to doubt his inference.  As Walker concludes: "This is how language changes. Alas." (I'm not sure if this one is going on my "Alas" list or not, but that's a personal decision.)

The outage outrage

Nick Kristof, call your editor. The two of you committed a language gaffe -- by Times standards, at least -- in your Nov. 22 column. But I doubt that any ordinary New York Times readers saw the problem in your third paragraph:

A month ago, I would have written more snarkily about residential generators. But then we lost power for 12 days after Sandy -- and that was our third extended power outage in four years. Now I’m feeling less snarky than jealous!

I wouldn't have noticed it either, had I not learned of the issue two days earlier in the Times’s weekly After Deadline blog. Commenting on a reference to “storm damage and power outages,” Philip Corbett, the paper's standards editor, said, “The utilities prefer this euphemism, but we should call them what they are: blackouts or power failures.”

Outage is a euphemism? In decades of editing and peeve-watching, I've never seen that nit picked. But Corbett is just enforcing the Times style guide, which (in the book version, published 1999) calls outage “jargon and a euphemism for failure, shutdown or cutoff.”

I couldn’t find much support for this notion in the usage archives, but one source went into it deeply enough that I suspect it of starting the anti-outage movement. That source is the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, by William and Mary Morris. In the second edition, published in 1977, the authors go into the outage question in detail:

One winter our town was hit by a particularly damaging sleet storm, with the result that we were without light and heat for five days. Partly out of understandable vexation at the hardships resulting, we expressed our displeasure at the term used by the electric light company to cover the situation. It was, they said, a ‘power outage.’ We thought ‘power failure’ would be more expressive – and said so.

The authors don’t say where they expressed their displeasure -- perhaps in the first edition of their Dictionary, 10 years earlier -- but in response, they say, “a knowledgeable reader wrote,” and they print his comment:

An outage is not a synonym for “power failure.” In the electrical generating industry, the term covers any situation in which equipment is not functioning; it means simply “The equipment is out.” It might be out for maintenance, improvement or replacement, as well as for breakdowns in service due to malfunction, accidents or acts of nature …

Knowledgeable Reader has a very plausible analysis of the situation:

I’m of the opinion that this bit of industrial jargon has moved from power plant usage to application throughout the industry and only recently into the vocabulary of the information media. Of course, the mass media’s uses would be during times when the public was inconvenienced and doubtless irritated by unplanned, accidental outages. Perhaps that more restrictive application has resulted in the unfavorable connotation and impression, as you seem to have implied, that outage is a euphemism.

KR points out that this use of outage was newish in general usage and associated with a special lexicon, both traits that can arouse word rage. Indeed, in 1977, not long after the Morrises encountered their outage, the Times heard from a reader not enchanted with the novel usage:

Re: “Outage” -- a new word.  In the “age” of lawlessness there should be no shortage of courage in dealing with an “outage” spawning “lootage” by “loutage.” The system demands “stoppage” or there may be no system to salvage. 

And the Morrises, as I read them, accept the Knowlegeable Reader's point of view. They don't press their case against outage; they give KR the last word. And they don't mention outage at all in the second edition of their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1985).

But it's harder to kill a peeve than to invent it. Some editor apparently took the Morrises' initial rant to heart, and kept the animus alive long enough to infect a contributor to the Times style manual -- and now it's online, trolling for new fans. Here's hoping it fails; this misbegotten peeve has earned its current obscurity.

Keeping the "suck" in "successful"

I’ve heard accessories called “assessories,” and succinct pronounced “sussinct” (not so often, but then it’s not so common a word), and flaccid started down the road to flassidity so long ago that the wrong pronunciation is now right. (That is, all our dictionaries list it, some as the majority usage.) Still, most English words with this Latin-derived double-c -- originally pronounced kk, as John Wells explains at his phonetics blog – continue to sound the cc as ks: accident, success, vaccinate.

But just as there’s no apparent reason for succinct to change its sound, there’s no way to know when another new pronunciation may appear. A couple of weeks ago, I had my first encounter with the nouveau successful, pronounced “sussessful.” The speaker was a caller to “On Point,” WBUR-FM’s talk show, who hailed from White House, Tenn., and who predicted an electoral victory for Mitt Romney. Why? “He’s a sussessful governor and a sussessful businessman as well.”

Yes, he had a Southern accent, but my Southern-speaking friend doesn’t recognize this as a regional thing, and of course it could be idiosyncratic. Anyone else out there hearing – or saying – “sussessful”?

Fighting off the 'were'-wolves

It's a good day, with the sun shining again and, over at Lingua Franca, a post by Geoff Pullum addressing Philip Corbett’s unnecessary anxiety about the was vs. were choice in the New York Times's columns.

As Pullum notes, many of us waffle on the choice of was or were in the subjunctive, or irrealis, construction. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage quotes Swift, Byron, Thackeray, Frost, and other worthies opting for was where a purist would use were. (Byron: "I wish H. was not so fat.") 

Like these august writers, and like many educated users of English, I go back and forth in actual usage. I learned early on that it was OK to be blasé about was vs. were, thanks to Bergen and Cornelia Evans’s Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957). Back in the mid-20th century, a lot of language authorities thought the subjunctive were was dying, and the Evanses were among them: "Was has been used as a past subjunctive in literary English for more than three hundred years and is the preferred form today." 

It's unlikely the Evanses had statistical proof for that "preferred form" judgment, and I doubt that it's even true. But given the number of subjunctive wases they saw in educated writing, they were confident in saying there were only two constructions in which were was clearly preferred: "If I were you," more or less a fixed phrase, and the literary "were I in a desert." 

We haven't abandoned subjunctive were as quickly as the midcentury mavens predicted. But if it disappeared overnight, as Pullum points out, there would be no loss of clarity; for other English verbs, the irrealis form is already the same as the simple past, or preterite: "If he had the money, he'd buy a generator." Is there any example in print of a failure to use the irrealis were causing genuine ambiguity? I don't think I've ever seen even a made-up example.*

By contrast, the recent blending of may and might – saying “if he had a raft, he may have survived” when you know that he didn’t survive -- can cause actual misunderstanding. (Way back in 2002 and 2003, Language Hat was bemoaning the development: "One of the changes going on in English that distresses me the most ... is the obsolescence of the contrary-to-fact past 'might have.'") Yet the takeover by may continues, and few notice the ambiguity. 

Why, then, should the meaningless was/were distinction persist, where no ambiguity ensues? I guess it's just one of those quirks of peevology.

*The myth of the "misplaced" only, on the other hand, has inspired dozens of made-up examples of alleged ambiguity, of the "I ate only the almonds/I ate the only almonds" genre. Yet I''m still waiting for a reader to show me an edited, printed example of an ambiguously placed only.

Microsoft founder repurposes the semicolon

I was leafing through the November issue of WSJ. Magazine, wondering at the whimsies of the 1 percent, when I came upon some of the oddest semicolon usage I’ve ever seen. In a one-page feature called Still Life,* a photo of several possessions (detail below) is annotated by the objects’ proud owner -- in this case, Paul G. Allen, cofounder of Microsoft. A chunk of the text:

In 1999, I acquired Les Poseuses by Georges Seurat. I feel lucky to own a museum-quality masterpiece; I discovered Tomorrow, the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein in the basement as a boy -- it used to belong to my father. It's one of the many books that fueled my curiosity about the future of technology; a DEC tape containing the program files created by me and Bill Gates in Boston in 1975 while writing the BASIC code for the MITS Altair 8800. It was sent to Albuquerque, where we founded Microsoft; this Etruscan head was the first antiquity I've ever bought. People often don't realize that many early sculptures, like this one, were painted. The 2,500-year-old piece depicts a man with red hair; my biggest musical inspiration, Jimi Hendrix, used this Fender Stratocaster to play his iconic rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. ...

Yes, the clauses on the same topic are separated with periods, while the unrelated clauses are connected by semicolons -- the opposite of the usual practice. Maybe you don't find this disconcerting, but as one brought up on the standard semicolon -- the one that joins related clauses -- I was reeling. Once I caught on, I could see the potential: There's a certain weird poetry to "The 2,500-year-old piece depicts a man with red hair; my biggest musical inspiration, Jimi Hendrix, used this Fender Stratocaster." But is weird poetry what you use semicolons for?

Since the WSJ is generally a well-edited paper, I’m guessing this is Paul Allen’s own tic. And I can see his editor thinking, what the hell, it’s only 200 words, why annoy him? (I sometimes wish I’d said that to myself, as an editor, more often.) But those semicolons make it 200 words of extremely odd prose.

*It's STILL LIFE on the web version, but in print it's STILL/LIFE; I don't know how you'd parse that, but I'm sure someone thought it looked classy. 

Muphry's Law across the pond

Earlier this month, the Financial Times ran a letter complaining about a couple of "grammatical" offenses, and once again the rule known as Muphry's/McKean's/Hartman's Law, or the Iron Law of Nitpicking, was in force: Any criticism of another's spelling or usage will itself contain at least one error.

This criticism came from faithful FT reader Brian Langdon-Pratt, who was in a state:

I'm shocked! Yes, really shocked! Reading the Financial Times last Friday -- as I’ve done for the past 40 years -- I came across two howlers. In the summary review by Nigel Andrews of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, he writes: “The hero Charlie wants to be ... even medalled as a social soldier”, and then later he compounds the grammatical offence by writing: "... half-brother Patrick is crash-coursed in literature". At least he put in a hyphen!

I know that standards of English grammar have slipped, but from Mr Andrews’ photo insert he looks old enough to know -- and hopefully to have been taught -- better.

The verb to medal has been around in the current sense since the 1960s, and Americans have complained about it for decades already. But as Graham at Linguism recently pointed out, medal is somewhat less familiar to the Brits, so if they want to smack it around a bit before they (inevitably) accept it, that's OK. The nonce coinage "crash-coursed," on the other hand, needs no defense -- the author isn't trying to impose it on the English-speaking world, he's just having a bit of fun.

But what about that "hopefully"? Does Langdon-Pratt not know that sentence-adverbial hopefully is (in Bryan Garner's terminology) a "skunked term" for true peevologists? I thought that perhaps hopefully aversion -- like our American which-that fetishism -- might have simply bypassed Britain. But according to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, "the ranks of hopefully haters grew steadily" in America from the mid-'60s to 1975, the year that "the issue seems to have crossed the Atlantic." British objectors, says MWDEU, "would repeat all the things American viewers with alarm had said, and add the charge of  'Americanism' to them."

You'd think a 40-year FT reader and language watcher would have encountered his culture's hopefully hostility at an impressionable age. But none of us can observe every language peeve, however attentive we may be -- hence the ubiquity, and inexorability, of Muphry's (etc.) Law.

A canoedling detour, an eggcorn update

I've been neglecting this blog, it's true, but I haven't been utterly idle. I wrote a piece on the word canoodle for Cognoscenti, the new ideas-and-opinions blog at the website of my favorite public radio station, WBUR. And because canoodling has been linked (speculatively) with canoes, the (brief) history of boating romance is part of the background. It's a delightful story even without the language angle: Check out the essay "Love Boats" for more on "canoedling."

In other business: If your memory is good, you may recall that we debated, back in September, whether "wager the pros and cons" (instead of "weigh") qualified as an eggcorn. Arnold Zwicky, eggcorn eggspert, has replied to my request for a judgment on the matter:

Not an easy one. But you do make a semantic case for the eggcorn. [I.e., I argued that a speaker might think of "wagering" as betting on the likelihood of alternative outcomes.]

My guess is that this is a mixed case, with some occurrences being ordinary (classical) malaprops and some being eggcorns. (The phonology is a bit distant in either case.)

 It does seem unlikely that it's going to catch on.

So I guess Eugenia Last, the astrologer who's responsible for most examples of "wager the pros and cons," will get the last (sorry) word; if she means "wager" in some plausible way, she's got herself an eggcorn.

Illustration: A couple on the Charles River in Newton, Mass. (Vintage postcard courtesy of Benson Gray.)