WHAT DOES A WORD MEAN?

By B R Sundara Rajan

Key point: It is not enough to know the meaning of words. We should also know how to use them in appropriate contexts.


A student in an upper primary class was told by his father that the best way to learn English was to look up the meanings of words in a dictionary and to memorize the words and their meanings. The boy, who had a small dictionary which presented words and their meanings and nothing else, had done just that.

One day, the teacher showed the class a picture of a building catching fire and fireman rescuing people from the upper floors. The teacher asked the class to write the story in English. The boy wrote out the story very well but, when it came to the rescue part, he wrote, “One of the firemen climbed into the third floor window. When he came out, he was pregnant.” When the teacher told him that it wasn’t correct, the boy maintained that he was right and showed him the entry in the dictionary for the word pregnant as carrying a child!