There are two kinds of readers in the world: those who blow past a word they don’t know, and those who drop everything, run to the dictionary, and dig and dig until they figure out what in the world something like pagophilic means. Yes, we fall into the latter camp. And pagophilia, if you’re wondering, means “a love of ice.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Two Kinds of Readers”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people in the world. The kind of people who come across an unfamiliar word in a text and they just keep reading. And then other people like me who can’t resist looking it up.
And I can’t resist looking up these words because I find out all kinds of other interesting stuff besides what the author was talking about. Yesterday, I came across the word pegafilic. Do you know this word? Pagophilic.
So philic probably meaning love of or liking. Yes, liking. But I don’t know what pago is. Pago, P-A-G-O, comes from the Greek word for ice or frost. And so you can talk about pagophilic animals like seals or certain kinds of birds.
Okay. They’re pagophilic. So when they get a cool rum drink, they want ice in it. Something like that. But the fun part about that for me was that it sent me down this pagophilic rabbit hole where I also came across words like pegophagia.
People who eat ice? Yes, yes. The condition of eating ice. Yes, yes. There are people who eat ice compulsively, often because they have an iron deficiency. There are ice-chewing enthusiasts who have support groups online.
Do they have contests, like conventions for ice-chewing? They have a bulletin board where they discuss the best kinds of ice machines and that kind of thing. Wow, really? Yeah, Vince Gill, the country music star, is a big ice chomper.
Now, this is very bad for your teeth. I’m not recommending it. But what I am recommending is looking up words that are unfamiliar to you when you’re reading them in a text. Now, on a Kindle or a smartphone, you can usually just hold down on the word that you don’t know when you’re reading a book.
And it will call up a dictionary and that helps you out. And it doesn’t really take you out of the narrative. But when you’re reading a paper, particularly fiction, looking up a word means the whole thing, everything that the author has worked so hard to make you feel dissipates by the time you get back to the book.
There is that problem, isn’t there? Yeah. So my strategy for this is sometimes I do note cards. Sometimes I just skip the word. If the word keeps coming up, obviously I look it up. But it’s hard. Maybe you do it at the end of the chapter rather than right on the spot.
Yeah, but then you have to go back to the beginning and it’s challenging. I do have a strategy, supposedly, for marking words that I need to look up. And there’s a particular way I bend the bottom corner of a page of books that I own.
Depending on how far you bend it up in the little white space shows you how far up the page the word is to be found. And usually I can re-find it with no trouble after I’m done with the book. And you should go back, you look it up, and you re-read the context, and then you get the word.
Right. Well, how do you manage the problem of looking up words? Do you stop everything down and run to the dictionary? Or do you make a note? Or what do you do? Give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts about reading and writing and language to words@waywordradio.org.
