> Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'

> Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too. If you don't understand what a word means, can't you ask the other person?