Visit to 1) park; 2) dictionary
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Piedmont Park’s refurbished natatorium, main outdoor pool.
While we were walking, we tentatively decided that a natatorium was most likely an indoor pool—the thinking went that the suffix “-ium” referred to a place of…whatever—think auditorium, aquarium (terrarium, not so much).
Turns out that the dictionary says that a natatorium is a swimming pool, especially one that’s indoors—but that’s not a requirement.
This kind of misunderstanding is a result of learning vocabulary from listening and from written usage, and not from study of the reference materials.