From: djheydt@kithrup.com

In article ,
William Vetter   wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>>
>> I'm trying and failing to remember who wrote an essay on
>> vocabulary, specifically in F/SF, and gave the example of a woman
>> who returned a book to him, saying, "I don't like this.  I have
>> to look up too many words."
>
>That means the reader is blitzed.  Several obscure words in a novel may
>excite the reader without blitzing her.

Blitzed, as in confused?  Or as in not possessed of a very large
vocabulary?  I get the impression that woman was like the little
boy in _Heidi,_ whom his grandmother would ask to read to her
from her hymnbook, but he would leave out any word he didn't
understand, so that there were hardly any nouns left in what he
read.
>
>> He may have been talking about a
>> book by A. Merritt, or that may have been in a different
>> paragraph; but the point he was making was that Merritt's work
>> was very rich in vocabulary.  I remember a sentence on the order
>> of " 'Crimson' isn't a word in the standard reader's vocabulary;
>> 'red' isn't a word for Merritt."
>>
>Crimson is in the dictionary.  Aileuromorphic is not in the dictionary
>(if you want to spell it like ailourophobia, it won't be in there
>either).

Yes, but (as above) that woman didn't *want* too look things up
in the dictionary.


--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the gmail edress.
Kithrup's all spammy and hotmail's been hacked.

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 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)