Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
OK, a challenge for you. In the Colin Dexter book I referred to in my first post, we have the sentence:
Quote:
Soon the two old friends were seated facing each other in the lounge bar, the surgeon resting his heavy-looking dolichocephalic skull upon his left hand.
Can you explain how you would know the meaning of the extremely obscure word "dolichocephalic" without looking it up in the dictionary? It's obvious from the context that it's some adjective describing a skull, but I honestly can't see how anyone could know what it actually meant unless they looked it up.
|
Surely, in that context, he was resting his jaw, and not his skull!
But I wouldn't have known what "dolichocephalic" meant -- and neither did Firefox's spellcheck.
I almost never use a dictionary when I'm reading. On the other hand, I use one all the time when I'm writing.