Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
Learning a new word through context can cause errors. For years I thought that the phrase "livid with anger" meant "red in the face" because that's what I saw when people became angry.  Many of the people around me thought the same. I was astonished when I looked it up and discovered that it meant "white with anger".  |
Actually... I don't know how it is in English, but in Spanish the equivalent word used to mean "purple", over the last decades (I guess), it has increasingly being used as "white" or "pale", to the point that now the dictionaries reflect it as meaning both "purple" and "white", it's a kind of self-antonym.
There are other things you cannot get from context. You can guess that a given word means some kind of horse carriage, or flower, or colour... but which exactly? Context does not go as far as that.