The sparkling side of ‘coruscating’

An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery.

Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to strip off the hide’. Generally, present-day meanings need not be those of the etymological originals, but in these two cases many writers are aware of the ancestry and think of sparkling behind coruscating and flaying behind excoriating.

Yet a large proportion of uses of coruscate are clearly meant to mean ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ – a figurative sense of excoriate. In the newspapers I have found: ‘Earl Spencer’s coruscating speech at Princess Diana’s funeral’; ‘the most honest and ruthlessly coruscating essay I’ve read’, and an example that simply can’t mean ‘sparkling’: ‘a self-coruscating standout from her first album’.