A good example: the word autopsia, Which I came across while working on a book of my own. I thought—by inference from the context and by analogy with “autopsy”— That autopsia meant a collection of stuffed or dissected animals, The sort of collection a natural historian might accumulate. But if I had thought more carefully and considered the word’s roots, I would have realized that it means A collection of objects one has “seen for oneself.” I discovered that when I looked up the familiar word “autopsy,” Which means, etymologically, to see for oneself.
