“
easy’. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. ‘Rust’, we are assured, is ‘the red desquamation of old iron’ or ‘the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal’, while a ‘scale’ is ‘any thing exfoliated or desquamated’. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for ‘desquamation’, we are told that it is ‘the act of scaling foul bones’.
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Henry Hitchings (Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary)