4.3. Go Look It Up
When you were young and reading a book, what did your parents tell you when you asked them the meaning of a word?
“Go look it up!”
Your parents had some good reasons to respond that way. It taught you to use the dictionary. That skill made you more self-reliant in the future. It also reflected the possibility that your parents simply didn't have any idea what the word meant. Oh they might have known various meanings of the word, but they couldn't know which one was correct without asking you to first read some of the text to determine its context.
The fact is that it isn't enough to know the many meanings of words; you also have to know the contexts appropriate for these meanings. Getting familiar with context is vexing enough ...
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