Homing in on 'hometown'

And what it has in common with 'right,' 'fulsome,' and 'coruscating.'

Photo by Jalen Hueser on Unsplash

Sandra Petruso, of Provincetown, R.I., writes: “My husband and I spent Christmas at a Caribbean resort. We got to talking with another couple, and the wife asked me where we were from. I said, ‘Do you mean where we were born?’ She said, ‘No, I mean your hometown.’ I said, ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ and she looked puzzled. Is a hometown where one was born or where one lives now?”

Sandra, unhelpfully, it can be either. The Oxford English Dictionary says it can even be “the town of one’s relatives or ancestors.”

Many English words have conflicting or contradictory meanings, but in context most of them give us no trouble. No one would mistake the bat used in baseball for the bats that are in the belfry or confuse the bow that a woman might wear in her hair with the bow that’s used in archery.

An obvious word to watch out for — as you know if you’ve ever given directions to someone who’s driving — is right: “Should I turn left?” “Right.”

But most words with clashing meanings are not particularly familiar. Fulsome has been misunderstood and misused often enough over the centuries that now it legitimately can mean “copious, generous” as well as “offensive.” Coruscating has recently gone down the same path: Its longstanding meaning is “brilliant, sparkling,” but as the Oxford Dictionary of English (a little sister of the OED) now acknowledges, it is often intended to mean “scathing”; the OED’s chief editor says his dictionary will soon follow.

The problem with fulsome and coruscating is not just that we don’t come across them often but that when we do, context may not make clear whether they’re meant to be positive or negative. Is “fulsome detail” pleasantly plentiful or tiresomely excessive? What about “fulsome praise”?

As for coruscating, what’s going on in the following snippet from The Atlantic? “The next year, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum published a coruscating takedown, ‘The Professor of Parody,’ in The New Republic, in which she argued …” Was Nussbaum making her case brilliantly or scathingly or both? I can guess, but I’d rather not have to.

Sorry — I’ve strayed from the subject. You asked about hometown. It’s much like right in that it’s best avoided in contexts where it may be ambiguous.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.