What’s in a Word: Shared Worlds/Shared Words

In my last article on word-smithery, I made the the observation that “There are two parties to [the author-reader relationship], of course, the writer has to know how to use the words, but the reader has to know how to read them. This requires a shared knowledge base or shared experience or, at minimum, a shared definition and/or connotation for the words.”

I was playing a video game the other day that brought this home in an intriguing way. The game is one of Big Fish Games Nancy Drew Mysteri...