You know, there was a time when I actually read. A couple of books per week or so. Like a normal person. Then came all the piles of scientific articles and the vomit of info called the internet (screw the capital I, I will never conform, pun intended) in general, joined by a chronic lack of time, and, after that, just a dearth of books in any understandable languages in my vicinity (and an aversion of spending yet more time looking at screens).
But, despite my terrible memory (guess why this blog exists), some things remain from those times. Like a (clearly diminishing) vocabulary of seldom used English words. For example denoting food I've never seen or eaten or bothered to look up but the names of which brain has decided to store anyway. Just learnt what a few of those are from an unexpected conversation: yorkshire pudding, black pudding, christmas pudding, wellington (yeah, no, not the one made out of rubber). Who knows, maybe in another 30 years will get to try some too...
I also maintain that there is a very respectable size of vocab picked up from games (the regular kind, I mean, not even the language-learning ones, sort of a no-brainer that one). Take apiary - a half-native speaker couldn't remember what a "beekeeping farm" was called. Quite certain that the mead-production-to-appease-the-viking-gods line of Settlers IV was the origin of my knowledge of this one.
Cheers,
Hedi
