Where I Found It
My boyfriend was reading an article on ESPN.com about Arian Foster, a football player for the Houstan Texans and came across the sentence "Foster was torrid before sustaining the injury in week 7." My boyfriend then asked me what it meant, because he thought that word meant something negative, like "terrible", but that didn't make sense to him based on Foster's playing, so he asked me, and that is how I encountered it.
Level of Familiarity
I know I have heard this word, and I thought I knew the meaning, so when he asked me what it meant, I answered confidently, "it means clouded or obscure." He said it couldn't that that didn't make any sense based on the context, so he told me the context and then he looked it up.
What it Means
Dictionary.com defines torrid as: subject to parching or burning heat, especially of the sun
Reflective Commentary
After looking up the defintion, we could clearly see what the sports analyst was trying to say, that Foster was "on fire." However, every defintion we saw related mostly to weather and climate, so we concluded that this was not the best word to describe a person. Also, I tried to find the word I had torrid confused with (clouded, obscure) and it was turbid :) Torrid is a nice word to know, and I can definitley use it while reading A Long Walk to Water to describe the setting, the Akobo desert connecting Sudan and Ethiopia.
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