I checked out Adrift: Seventy-six days lost at sea by Steven Callahan today and started reading it this evening. I noticed something very interesting almost right away. There were lots of penciled in checkboxes next to various lines in the text, and on the lines that were checked, a word or two was underlined in pencil. In looking at these words, I guessed they were words that one of the previous library patrons who checked out the book didn’t know. Here’s the list of words:
- don (as in "don a raincoat")
- shoal
- trawlers
- rogue
- trends
- nuances
- vivid
- evolved
- cohesive
- astrophysicist
- intuitive extrapolation
- enthralled
- exorbitant
- communion
- convoluted
- exhilarating
- helm
- crevice
- quay
- pandemonium
- autumn equinox
- lunatics
- capstan
- prone
- rancorous
- abated
- aft
After that, it appears they gave up. Now, at first I thought maybe it was a child, but I’m not sure that’s the case since there were many fairly complex words that were not underlined (e.g. "perspective", "conclusions", "hydrodynamics").
For some reason, I found this all very interesting.
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