Serious readers, when they are reading literature they consider important, routinely look up any words they do not know.<\/p>\n
But there are also \u201cintuitive\u201d readers, who consider themselves of sufficient wisdom to figure out a word just by reading the sentence and trusting their life experience and common sense to grasp the writer\u2019s meaning. Today we will try to expose this policy as wishful thinking.<\/p>\n
The three examples below are sentences you might find in print or online. Each contains a possibly unfamiliar word which, if misinterpreted, sabotages the meaning of the sentence.<\/p>\n
\u2022 On a blistering August morning we came upon a 1960 Buick coruscating in the sun<\/em>.<\/p>\n Understanding coruscating<\/em> is the key to understanding the sentence. The Intuitive Reader ponders the word, with its echoes of corrosion<\/em> and rust<\/em>, and concludes that the car was falling apart. A reader\u2019s first impressions matter, and this reader now is picturing a broken-down old wreck. But coruscating<\/em> means \u201csparkling.\u201d In fact, the car in the tale has been lovingly maintained by its owner. The reader now has a distorted view of the author\u2019s main character, and may well go on to misread the intent of the story.<\/p>\n \u2022 What we heard on the demo sounded like a bashful lad with a limpid voice<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Intuitive Reader doesn\u2019t have to look up limpid <\/em>to know that the kid on the demo can forget about a singing career. You can\u2019t make it in the music business with a \u201climpid\u201d singing voice, for what else could limpid<\/em> mean but \u201cweak\u201d or \u201clifeless\u201d? But the reader has it wrong: a limpid voice is pure and crystal clear. The kid\u2019s future looks bright. If he can sing in tune, and his material is strong, he could go places.<\/p>\n \u2022 The man was in a parlous condition, and a lot of his friends headed for the exit<\/em>.<\/p>\n Intuitive Readers know what parlez-vous fran\u00e7ais<\/em> means, and they know that parlance <\/em>is a style or manner of speaking. So to them, this sentence might appear to tell a cautionary tale about a \u201cparlous\u201d fellow who gets a proper comeuppance for hogging the conversation one time too many. But in reality the situation is far darker: parlous<\/em> means \u201cdire\u201d or \u201cprecarious.\u201d This man is in trouble. He deserves our compassion, and his fair-weather friends deserve our scorn.<\/p>\n Thanks to the internet, it has never been easier or less time-consuming to look words up. Those who refuse to do so are in constant danger of missing the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Serious readers, when they are reading literature they consider important, routinely look up any words they do not know. But there are also \u201cintuitive\u201d readers, who consider themselves of sufficient wisdom to figure out a word just by reading the sentence and trusting their life experience and common sense to grasp the writer\u2019s meaning. Today […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-definitions","category-vocabulary"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}