Weather update

The weather forecast told us that today would be cold, grey and wet, so there was no point in going for a walk. It was wrong, but we didn't know that, so we spent the morning strolling round Durham on a tour of inspection. Nothing serious (so far, and as far as can be seen by the casual stroller) but impressive nonetheless. The speed at which the Wear is moving is - impressive; all the stray branches have been washed off the weirs, and are rushing downstream like gigantic pooh-sticks (with a makor tangle building up at Elvet Bridge); in fact the weirs are completely submerged, visible only as eddies in the water. We saw a couple of cormorants flying past, clearly wondering where to land now that their normal perch has vanished - also a goose floating backwards, looking very aggrieved.

We were able to walk along the riverside path some of the time, but kept being blocked where the Wear has overflowed its banks. It was lower this morning, though, than it had been yesterday, when durham_rambler saw the water lapping at the sign outside the new hotel. Even if we didn't have the evidence of what he'd seen, it would be obvious from the tidemarks: a strip of fine muddy silt at the water's edge, and then a border of broken twigs and leaves beyond it.

We're way up the hill here, well out of reach of the river, however high it rises. But despite this morning's sunshine, it has been raining again...

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.

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*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.