• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

that at diferent times and places the same words are not equally familiar items in daily usage. Contemporary writers will employ most words as they are ordinarily used today, and you will know which words these are because you are alive today. But in reading books written in the past, it may be more difficult to detect the words the author is using as most people did at the time and place he was writing. The fact that some authors intentionally employ archaic words, or archaic senses of words, complicates the matter further, as does the translation of books from foreign languages.

Nevertheless, it remains true that most of the words in any book can be read just as one would use them in talking to one's friends. Take any page of this book and count the words we are using in that way: all the prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, and almost all of the verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. In this chapter so far, there have been only a few important words: "word," "term," ambiguity," "communication," and perhaps one or two more. Of these, "term" is clearly the most important; all the others are important in relation to it.

You cannot locate the key words without making an effort to understand the passage in which they occur. This situation is somewhat paradoxical. If you do understand the passage, you will, of course, know which words in it are the most important. If you do not fully understand the passage, it is probably because you do not know the way the author is using certain words. If you mark the words that trouble you, you may hit the very ones the author is using specially. That this is likely to be so follows from the fact that you should have no trouble with the words the author uses in an ordinary way.

From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble. It is likely that these words are important for the author as well. However, they may not be.

It is also possible that words that are important for the Coming to Terms With an Author 103

author do not bother you, and precisely because you understand them. In that case, you have already come to terms with the author. Only where you fail to come to terms have you work still to do.

Technical Words and Special Vocabularies

So far we have been proceeding negatively by eliminating the ordinary words. You discover some of the important words by the fact that they are not ordinary for you. That is why they bother you. But is there any other way of spotting the important words? Are there any positive signs that point to them?

There are several. The first and most obvious sign is the explicit stress an author places upon certain words and not others. He may do this in many ways. He may use such typographical devices as quotation marks or italics to mark the word for you. He may call your attention to the word by explicitly discussing its various senses and indicating the way he is going to use it here and there. Or he may emphasize the word by defining the thing that the word is used to name.

No one can read Euclid without knowing that such words as "point," "line," "plane," "angle," "parallel," and so forth are of the first importance. These are the words that name geometrical entities defined by Euclid. There are other important words, such as "equals," "whole," and "part," but these do not name anything that is defined. You know they are important from the fact that they occur in the axioms. Euclid helps you here by making his primary propositions explicit at the very beginning. You can guess that the terms composing such propositions are basic, and that underlines for you the words that express these terms. You may have no· difficulty with these words, because they are words of common speech, and Euclid appears to be using them that way.

If all authors wrote as Euclid did, you may say, this business of reading would be much easier. But that of course is 104 HOW TO READ A BOOK

not possible, although there