Just realised that I’ve been misunderstanding the word “circumspect” all of my life. I had always assumed that it meant looking at something briefly or superficially, but looking it up after seeing it in a context where that doesn’t work, I realise that it means more-or-less the opposite: looking carefully at all aspects of a situation. This illustrates a danger with trying to understand words from their etymology—I had assumed that it meant “looking just around the edge of something” like the use of “circum” in “circumference”, not “looking at something from all aspects”.