ABSTRACT
Somebody is writing a children’s book called Pinny the Who? (and it’s not at all derivative!). Their target audience is about eight—the Goosebumps demographic, if you will. Suppose, however, that owing to their inexperience our author vastly overestimates the average eight-year-old’s vocabulary. Instead of sticking to words like bought, brought, everything, thought, through, and wrong, they’ve peppered the text with the likes of abhor, chasm, complement, forsake, haughty, illicit, and—get this—rachitic. As a result, the work’s intended audience frequently misunderstands the author’s meaning: The Tyrannosaurus’s haughty attitude was complemented by acute rachitism is taken to mean something more like The hot Tyrannosaurus was complimented by cute ratchets.
