/ˈsɪntɪleɪt/ · verb
SCINTILLATE
from Latin scintilla, a spark — to scintillate is not to glow but to flash: light that arrives as events, quick and plural.
light that flashes · light in the plural · the sparkle of a quick mind
Why the stars tremble
A star's light is perfectly steady; it is our own air that breaks it — layers of restless atmosphere bending each ray a hundred ways before it lands. The twinkle is the sky flinching. Astronomers call it scintillation.
Fire in the stone
Drop white light into a cut diamond and it comes back in pieces — each facet a small prism, splitting the beam into reds and blues that flash and vanish as the stone turns. Jewellers have a word for this throwing of coloured sparks: fire.
A thousand suns, briefly
Wind roughens the water into countless tilted mirrors, and for an instant each one catches the sun and flings it back. The path of light on a moving sea is not one reflection but thousands — lighting and dying faster than you can count.
The mind, sparkling
And we lend the word to people. A scintillating talker throws off ideas the way the sea throws off light — quick, bright, too many to hold. To scintillate is to be, for a moment, impossible to look away from.
in a sentence
The conversation scintillated — wit struck wit until the whole table seemed to be throwing sparks.
Light that will not sit still. The universe, every so often, showing off.