Miss Bingley began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room. Why does this sentence from Pride and Prejudice sound odd to modern ears? The novel was written over two hundred years ago, so meanings may have shifted, but what, exactly, creates this sense of strangeness? The oddity comes from the verb abuse. How can someone be abused if they are not present at the scene? In modern English, abuse usually refers to physical, sexual, or verbal mistreatment. In all of these cases, the victim is typically aware of the abuse or is directly acted upon. Even in verbal abuse at a distance (for example, over the telephone), the abused person is still the immediate recipient. That expectation doesn’t hold in Austen’s sentence. The woman being “abused” has left the room and cannot hear what is being said. For a modern reader, the usage feels wrong. Austen used it to mean to speak ill of someone. When Jane Austen writes that Miss Bingley “began abusing her,” she simply means that Miss Bingley began speaking maliciously about her once she had gone.