[worm in glove]

Hello everyone. I am a new member.

I am a relatively new convert to audiobooks and I have to say I love getting immersed in these wonderful audio worlds... until I mishear a word or hear a word I don't know. Then it suddenly gets very frustrating. I don't know how to let a word go so I just keep thinking about it. How do you deal with this?

Here are some examples. I was listening to an excerpt of the book Josephine by Patricia Hruby Powell and I heard the expression 'a mecorous girl'.

A what? I furiously searched for this adjective online as I listened to the phrase over and over and at one point it struck me that the reader was saying a MERE CHORUS GIRL. Oh dear.

The other day I was listening to Bill Clinton's autobiography and when he was a child, his mother told him that they 'need abandon the house'. Why isn't there a 'to' after 'need' I thought, and why do they need to abandon the house anyway? It doesn't make sense. Repeated listening gave me no joy but I luckily found a text version online which solved the mystery 'need A MAN IN THE HOUSE.' Jeez.

And then there are unknown words, technical words, foreign words, proper nouns which you don't know how to spell, words which the reader pronounces differently than you and words which lose their context without proper punctuation.

Classic books are often full of antiquated words which are not used any more. Like how am I supposed to know that when Charles Dickens uses the word copper he is referring to a big kettle?

And without the capital letters how do you figure out that a Gold Medallion house has nothing to do with medallions but Gold Medallion is the name of a company or scheme selling modern houses?

When reading a print book it's easy to stop and look up words in a dictionary or to get the meaning from helpful punctuation and so on but when you're listening, words just fly by and even when you have a dictionary nearby, you're not sure that you heard a term correctly so you have to figure out the spelling of the word first.

Sometimes I look at print versions while listening at the same time but that kind of spoils the whole purpose of audiobooks. Audiobooks are most fun on the go not stuck to the computer trying to figure out individual words.

I am a well-read person, if I may say so myself. but I am finding this aspect of audiobooks hard to deal with. I'm sure I'm not the only one who experiences this. How do you deal with this? Do you just let such words gloss over you in favour of just getting the general idea of the story or do you have some efficient way of figuring things out? Getting bogged down in deciphering and understanding single words or phrases can spoil the joy of audiobooks. It also makes listening slower because I keep rewinding and re-listening.

Oddly enough, when I watch a film I don't obsess over each and every word in the script (even though I do watch films with subtitles sometimes) but when I listen to an audiobook, I do. Understanding every word seems paramount. Do you get this feeling as well or is it just one of my OCD habits?