‘Salacious’ and other words that don’t quite mean what people think
If there’s anything the world learned regarding the testimony of adult film actress Stormy Daniels in Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York, it’s that her story was salacious. Daniels was “the bringer of salacious detail” (New York Times), she provided “salacious testimony” (The Washington Post) and listeners whispered
“about a particularly salacious detail”
(NBC News).
But was it indeed salacious? Our friends at Merriam-Webster say that the word means “arousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination.” That doesn’t sound to me like what was going on in the courtroom. Was the testimony explicit? Sure. Lurid, most definitely. Depressingly squalid, you bet. But not, I’d say, salacious.
The disconnect was just another example of what I have long thought of as Redefinition by Misapprehended Inference. It’s the means by which numerous people repeatedly hear or see a word used in a perfectly standard context but then misunderstand, a little or a lot, what was in fact meant, and then carry that misapprehension forward, contributing to its widespread use.
That’s how repeated references, across many years, to “coruscating wit” have led to the increasingly common impression that “coruscating” means something like “direly and viciously critical” — in part because what is wit if it isn’t wielded to insult and put down? (sigh) — and also, certainly, because the word literally looks as if it means corrosive and scathing, with a side order of excoriating.
But what does “coruscating” actually mean? Sparkling.
Just that. Simply: sparkling. Or it’s the means by which the sight of the phrase “feminine pulchritude” has led to the notion — based, I presume, on the tastes of a reasonable portion of the American population — that “pulchritude” is a fancy way of saying buxomness, when all the word means is beauty.
Now, if you’re of the school that subscribes to the notion that all words mean what some people think they mean — a school in which I never enrolled — then I’ve probably already lost you. You’re welcome to use “bemused” to mean wryly amused, as if wearing a bow tie and sipping a martini, “nonplussed” to mean cool as a cucumber and “penultimate” to mean wow, like, ultimate to the max, dude, when what they truly (pardon me: traditionally) mean is, respectively, “confused and bewildered,” “unsure and perplexed” and “second to last.” (There’s also “antepenultimate,” referring not to your dad’s wonderful sister, but meaning “the one that comes before second to last.”)
As to “salacious,” then, I can only imagine that hearing countless novels and movies (have you seen Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers”?) referred to as salacious might lead one to guiltily assume that anything sexual, even if it’s grimly mercenary and barely consensual, can be described as salacious.
And yet: One of the upsides to there being far more words in the English language than any of us can make use of is that, if one truly delves, one can find the word that means precisely what one wants and needs it to mean, rather than nearly what one means — or not even vaguely what one means.
All you have to do is look (it up).