Happy April, and welcome back to another Tell Me Something Tuesday! Rainy Day Ramblings has another great prompt for us to discuss for this week’s post.
Lets talk big, obscure words in books.
How do you feel about authors throwing big, obscure words into their books?
Many of you are familiar with the fact that I was born and raised in Estonia. My favourite thing in school was translating text from English/Russian into Estonian. Using the dictionary to find the meaning of words I did not yet know and starting to understand the text was so interesting and made me feel extremely proud of myself. Sadly I don’t actually speak, nor read, Russian anymore but English did stick with me.
I don’t read very heavy literature. The authors I read tend to keep the language simple and easy to follow; however even though English is my second language, big words don’t intimidate me. I have a dictionary app on my phone, that I just whip out whenever I stumble across a word I do not know. I am all for authors using big, obscure words if they flow in the text and (eventually) make sense. I enjoy tripping on a word and finding out the meaning in the process. In all fairness, there are still a lot of words I don’t know so I still use the dictionary pretty much on a daily basis.
For example here are some of my recent searches:
- Apocryphal
- Trollop
- Vicenza
- Changeling
- Atonement
4 Comments
Stephanie
I love this! Smartphones and dictionary apps are so ridiculously convenient. I love it when I spot a word I don’t know. I immediately stop and look it up (on my phone or on the computer, depending on where I’m sitting) and I write it down in my reading notebook. I used to do this years ago and would type out all the words I’d collected from each book on my old book blog, and while I didn’t think it helped much at the time, I recently went through my old blog and went, “How did I ever NOT know those words???” Obviously, it ended up helping increase my vocabulary a LOT, so I started the practice again, and it makes me so happy. 🙂
Words I’ve recently looked up:
officious
sententious
pomace
coarctation
torpid
Kat
Glad I’m not alone 😊💕
ktrobson
It’s impressive that you used to sit and translate things at school! I’m always amazed by people who speak multiple languages – English is my first and only language and I still manage to mess it up!
I didn’t know what apocryphal or Vicenza meant either until now, just had to look them up 😂
Kat
Thank you! Sadly English was the only one that stuck! I studied Russian, German and Swedish and cannot speak nor understand any of those now x