shewhomust | Crossed words

I recently worked out something that had been puzzling me: and I worked it out because someone said something that solved another puzzle.

I'd been puzzled about people misusing the word 'coruscating'. Not because I thought everyone should know what 'coruscating' means, but because it seemed a sufficiently obscure word that if you didn't know what it meant, why would you know it at all? If someone mentioned, say, "coruscating wit" and you didn't know it meant 'sparkling', wouldn't you go and find out, or at least just forget about it, instead of assuming it meant something like 'scathing'? And then, on page 218 of Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves, I read: "Her mother marched into the drawing room and coruscated the men there. They sat open mouthed and cowed as she withered them with her scorn."* I was enjoying the book very much, and this was such an awkward expression, I was completely taken aback by it. It wasn't until a couple of days later that I found the missing link: castigate - she castigated the men. Of course...

The cause of this enlightenment was that someone used a key word. The word, however, was not 'castigated', but 'abstruse'. Another of those odd misuses is 'an obtuse argument', but I'd always assumed that when people said this, they meant 'obscure'. And I must have seen an example of this fairly recently when D. used the word 'abstruse', because it clicked into place: "Of course, not 'obscure', 'abstruse' - and come to think of it..."

I know: slow and convoluted, but it's all I have in the way of thought processes.

*I blame the editor; authors slip up from time to time, and it's the editor's (or copy editor's) job to catch them.