LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
GreyShuck@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Yes. Why do you ask?
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That last link is a study, where researchers provided English undergrads with that passage, and asked them to think aloud while reading it. They had access to dictionaries and could look up words.
Here are the results:
Image
khannie@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That last bullet point is shocking to me. To be an English undergraduate I would have expected them to enter with very strong vocabulary and an innate desire to read / love of the language.
I had no trouble understanding it and thought it painted a really clear picture.
isyasad@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is interesting but with n=85 and Bleak House being the ONLY sample text they use, I wouldn’t really put much trust in the results.
jeffw@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Do you have a link to the study?