Time to confess: tell us about a time when you used a word whose meaning you didn’t actually know (or were very wrong about, in retrospect).
English is not my first language. I’m learning, so I often use the dictionary or the help of others to find the right words to speak and write. of course I’ve made a lot of mistakes while speaking some of them funny. Like when I described myself dressed in a wooden coat, instead of a woolen coat, and so on.
When I have doubts and I don’t have my dictionary handy, I usually try to avoid the difficult word and explain what I have in my mind with words I know.
I have been a teacher of writing in Spanish in a Journalism School. I encouraged my students to use the dictionary, above all when they had doubts. I had once a student with very bad orthography and poor vocabulary. I was trying to convince him to use more often te dictionary to solve his doubts and he replied : but I don’t hesitate! I don’t know when I need to check a word. It was really difficult to teach him.