What's the last time you looked up a word while reading a book? Watching TV or a movie?
For me, while reading a book it was Marilyn French's The Love Children (2009) -- about a dozen words, mostly specifics to do with food and cooking. Movies and TVs -- it's been many a blue moon. Years. Except for names and places, maybe decades.
When you're not quite sure about a word's meaning, how do you handle it? If access is easy, I'll look it up in a dictonary online or in a book; if not, I'll scribble a note on a card, a scrap of paper or in a notebook while trying to figure it out through contextualizing the way it's used (sort of like twenty questions). I will also ask somebody. How about you? Last time I used a word without knowing what it meant was for an English (or Language Arts or whatever it was called then) class in grade school -- "He stenched the book." I have never "stenched the book" since. I have for a long time greatly enjoyed malapropisms and so-called eggcorns. To test your response, this is sort of along the lines of acyrologia.* Evil! As for dialects and pronunciations and international language usage, that's a whole different set of beasts to be tackled in other "posts."
*If you already know what acyrologia means, you win a cookie from Don Rickles! Seriously.
Today's Rune: Breakthrough.
6 comments:
Erik, my son Dane is a walking dictionary. I ask him constantly for the meaning of words and he almost always knows...
I read a book with a lot of words I did not know and had to look up. I put them in the front of the book so my daughter would not have to go to the dictionary when she read it. Words are fascinating. Some meanings never change and others do for good or for ill. There are even words for this like ameliorate and the word for a negative change which I can't remember.
talking in acronyms? I'm just guessing. I still find words I don't know periodically. I almost always write them down to look up later. And now I'm going to try and find the meaning of acrologia.
The context within the sentence was one of the few real things the nuns taught me that i use today. But I ain't (yes it is a fuckin' word) shy about using a dictionary of even GASP! A thesaurus if I have n dictionary available.
acyrologia= just guessing from the sentences before it. It is some form of misuse of language?
Don't have to write it down. If a word I hear is not in my vocabulary, it will haunt me until I add it (usually via Dictionary.com). I love words.
Clever title for a blog about words as well.
Acyrologia is a perfectly cromulent word. ;)
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