Mea Culpa: the glittering fabric of the constitution

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Paparazzo in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ from 1960 ( Pathé/Wiki Commons)

One of the temptations of fancy writing is that we lead ourselves into using words because of what they sound like rather than what they mean. In an article about Boris Johnson last weekend we said that he “was responsible for corrupting and coruscating the fabric of Britain’s constitution”. This is fine alliteration, but as Philip Nalpanis pointed out, “coruscating” means “glittering”, so it doesn’t make much sense.

“Coruscating” has been confused for “excoriating”, taking off a layer of skin, for so long that some dictionaries now list “severely critical” as a second meaning. Even so, as long as a significant number of readers expect the original meaning, we should avoid using the word in that sense – or indeed at all.

But neither should we have substituted “excoriating”, because it is the wrong metaphor for a piece of cloth anyway. We kept it simple, which is usually better, and accused our former prime minister of “corrupting the fabric of Britain’s constitution”.