I’m going to go against what I wrote in that last post and go off-topic, risking the future of this thread. SPOILER ALERT: don’t read this unless you’ve already read Shay’s fanfic.
In Shay’s blog post about the importance of fiction, there was a reason that wasn’t specifically mentioned that I found out about today, when I shared her fanfic story with a non-native English speaker who was a friend of mine. After reading the story, the friend commented on how sad of a story it was, in that a character died. I then had the opportunity to explain that when “a fever breaks”, it means the fever’s over and the body is healthy again, not that the fever overwhelmed the body to the point of death. Consequently, I learned that fiction is a good way to learn about how a language works, with its idioms and quirks, in a medium where there aren’t real life-and-death consequences.
