The Reading Method of Acquiring Vocabulary

Abstract

It is with our words as with our friends: the acquaintance is likely to be gradual and unpremeditated. We may be first puzzled by the new expres sion; when we meet it again something of its strangeness is gone; by the time we have met it a dozen times we are able to guess with tolerable ac curacy its exact significance. We may sometimes be curiously deceived by our inferences, but on the whole and in the long run we are right.1