About the right word

The Culture Secretary, who this week is apparently someone called Lucy Frazer, was on the wireless yesterday and at one point she referred to “the tenants of our democracy” when (I assume) she meant “tenets”. I indulged myself in a performative what-is-the-world-coming-to Twitter moment but, as we know, what starts as a mistake might become the generally accepted “correct” version. Language changes, but as Elizabeth Ribbans points out, “some people might be more vexed about a semantic shift when it arises from a seeming misunderstanding rather than a slow morphing.” Which is me told, I guess, especially since, although I sneered at Frazer’s goof, I wasn’t aware of the mistake that Ribbans identifies in her article, that “coruscating” doesn’t actually mean the same as “excoriating”. Or, if enough people use them interchangeably, perhaps it does.

Does it matter, though, when the majority of English speakers probably wouldn’t use or even recognise either word? Vaguely relevant, someone else tweets a chunk of Nabokov from 1948, combining two of his obsessions, butterflies and words, and sneering at those whose interest in either remains superficial: 

The Germans did their best to ignore the new trends and continued to cherish the philately-like side of entomology. Their solicitude for the “average collector who cannot be made to dissect” is comparable to the way nervous publishers pamper the “average reader”—who cannot be made to think.