shining brightly
This word appears in a New York Times editorial by Nicholas D. Kristof: “a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like ‘fulgent’ and ‘supercilious.’ ”
I like this word. The defintion suprises me. It sounds like a word with dark and evil undertones. It holds so many consonants and squeezes the life out of its vowels. It makes me think of fumigation. It seems full of something that somehow feels dark, like Folger's coffee. I don't know why. No similar words with the same roots spring to mind, so maybe it is simple unfamiliar. Anyway, thanks for a word that more fully illuminates my vocabulary.