You can't learn everything from books

Some things, you just have to hear.

I'm listening to an audio-book (so okay, yes, technically still a book...) and I just heard the narrator use the word truculent and was caught in my tracks. I thought, "What did he just say?" And then, "Oh wait, is that how you pronounce that word?"

See, I'd seen it a few times in books before, enough to know that it meant forceful or aggressive. But I thought it was pronounced "tru-sue-lent". Apparently it's pronounced "truck-you-lent". You can listen to it here.

Similarly, I read several of the Harry Potter books before the movies came out. And the boy, Seamus Finnegan, was always called "See-mus" in my head. Until I watched the movie a couple times and realized it's correctly pronounced "Shay-muhs". Huhn.

On a slightly related vein, I have a large vocabulary and can use all the words I know in sentences. But if you ask me to define them, I can't. They mean what they mean and I have a hard time using other words to define them. Because, well, despite the concept of synonyms, most words - in my opinion - do not have exact equals and therefore each has its own perfect situation in which to use it.

But I realized this is because I learned the words mostly by seeing them in use and discovered their meanings through context. And this has created some amusing situations. Well, amusing to me, anyway, when I finally learn the correct definition of a word...no one else has noticed because it all goes on silently in my head. I learned that with a lot of words I understand the general idea, and can use them in the correct context (thanks to rote memorization) but when I look up the actual definition, I'm surprised it's slightly off from what I thought it would be.

I can't give you any explicit examples of this. Just know that I amuse myself by picturing the little girl in my mind, with an overly-large book propped open on her lap, deriving her own meanings based on her limited life experiences.

Although in more recent years I have taken the time to actually look up words as I come across them. And I'm pleased to be seeing results. Occasionally I'll come across a word and now know what it means, but remember the first time I encountered that word and didn't know what it meant. (I used to write the definition of the word in the book and it's fun to re-read a book and realize I now know what that word means.)

It will be amusing to see what my vocabular-gains are in the future because sadly, I'm currently working with a dictionary that broke in half and I can't find the first half of the book. So if my vocabulary seems a bit heavy on words south of "Indonesia" you'll know why. (And yes, I could look it up online, but when I'm in bed reading, I don't want to turn my computer back on just to look up one word. Hence using half a book...)