Word for Word

Tags:: dictionary,; education,; language,; Peter Mark Roget,; thesaurus,; words,; writing

In his biography of Roget, The Man Who Made Lists, Joshua Kendall argues that Roget created a “paracosm,” or alternate universe, in the orderly lists of words he began making in childhood: “both a replica of the real world as well as a private, imaginary world.” The thesaurus that would grow out of the lists was even more hyperorderly. The unruliness of language—and the world of concepts that words denote—could be tamed in his pages. When he discovered that he actually had 1,002 concepts listed instead of his planned 1,000, he simply condensed two entries to achieve his round number: “Absence of Intellect” became 450a and “Indiscrimination,” 465a.

Roget’s thesaurus was crucially a conceptual undertaking, and, according to Roget’s deeply held religious beliefs, a tribute to God’s work. His efforts to create order out of linguistic chaos harks back to the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, who was charged with naming all that was around him, thereby creating a perfectly transparent language. It was, according to the theology of St. Augustine, a language that would lose its perfection with the Fall of Man, and then irreparably shatter following construction of the Tower of Babel. By Roget’s time, Enlightenment ideals had taken hold, suggesting that scientific pursuits and rational inquiry could discover antidotes to Babel, if not a return to the perfect language of Adam. Though we no longer cling so tightly to these Enlightenment notions about language in our postmodern age, we still carry with us Roget’s legacy, the view that language can somehow be wrangled and rationalized by fitting the lexicon into tidy conceptual categories.

Roget intended for his readers to immerse themselves in the orderly classification system of the thesaurus so that they might better understand the full possibilities for human expression. As Roget first conceived it, the book did not even have an alphabetical index—he included it later as an afterthought. His goal, then, was not to provide a simple method of replacing synonym A with synonym B but instead to encourage a fuller understanding of the world of ideas and the language representing it.

In England, the Thesaurus was widely praised upon publication. The Westminster Review lauded the work’s “ideal classification,” which meant that “the whole Thesaurus may be read through, and not prove dry reading either.” An international edition would eventually popularize his work in the United States as well, becoming a household item in the 1920s during the crossword craze. Eventually “Roget” would become synonymous with the thesaurus itself, even if many of the contemporary reference works that bear his name share little resemblance to his careful classification system.

More than a century and a half later, the impact of Roget’s creation continues to reverberate in the proliferation of thesauruses, both in print and electronic varieties. Yet the thesaurus has also come under fire time and time again—what does it have to offer the modern writer?

Qualms about the proper use of the thesaurus go back to Roget’s original. An anonymous review in the September 1852 issue of The Athenaeum voiced the concern that the thesaurus would simply be used as a “crutch” for writers, who would be better off avoiding “the frequent recurrence to a work of this kind.” The view of it as a mere crutch persists to this day, especially among writers of fiction and poetry who see the frequent consultation of it as somehow impeding natural expression. Consider this pronouncement from Stephen King in a 1986 piece for The Writer:

You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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The thesaurus is invaluable to anyone writing formal verse. It allows the poet to sift through lists of words while seeking words with the right metrical qualities and nuance of meaning, as well as possibly rhyme.

Rhyming dictionaries are similarly helpful, and ideally should present all possible rhyming words - something software now makes possible.

Posted by Mike Cope on Thu 22 Mar 2012
Often when I write I'll feel a word vibrating at an extrememly low, inaudible frequency. Once I glance at it in a thesaurus the word will resonate and become obvious.

Posted by dave on Thu 22 Mar 2012
Ode to a Thesaurus
by Franklin P. Adams

O precious codex, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

For I would pen, engross, indite,
Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,
Record, submit--yea, even write
An ode, an elegy to bless--

To bless, set store by, celebrate,
Approve, esteem, endow with soul,
Commend, acclaim, appreciate,
Immortalize, laud, praise, extol.

Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,
Expedience, utility--
O manna, honey, salt of earth,
I sing, I chant, I worship thee!

How could I manage, live, exist,
Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,
Be present in the flesh, subsist,
Have place, become, breathe or inhale,

Without thy help, recruit, support,
Opitulation, furtherance,
Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,
Favor, sustention, and advance?

Alas! Alack! and well-a-day!
My case would then be dour and sad,
Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,
Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.

* * *

Though I could keep this up all day,
This lyric, elegiac, song,
Meseems hath come the time to say
Farewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!

Posted by Tom Bell on Thu 22 Mar 2012
I echo Mike Cope's sentiments above. As a translator of medieval texts--including verse--the thesaurus is for me an invaluable tool in trying to match, as nearly as possible, the myriad qualities of a word in Latin or medieval German with a word (or words) in English.

Working recently on Hildegard of Bingen, for example, I struggled for some time to find a suitable phrasing for "sol et luna ipsis incouenienter ostendantur", a particularly striking way of describing the disordering cosmological impact of human sin. The phrase truly turns on the adverb "incouenienter" to express the way the sun and moon were acting against type, as it were: out of the ordinary, unusual, unpredictable, but all from the perspective of how they are supposed to function within the divinely ordered cosmos at whose pinnacle (and as whose microcosm) stands humanity. This is where rummaging through the thesaurus proved invaluable: "The sun and moon prove themselves intractable, for they do no follow their courses as set by God but exceed them."

Posted by Nathaniel Campbell on Thu 22 Mar 2012
I fear that these electronic thesaurus could stop invention of new words .IN old days people were used to improvise word for new things using their old vocabulary or from other languages .But as such list of synonym is available at click of mouse that attitude to create new words will die and new words added to language will dwindle day by day !
I mean to say there is disasters effect of containment of language !

Posted by NEELESH SALPE on Thu 22 Mar 2012
THE DOMAIN OF THESAURUS REX

Royally he treads the land,
The earth, the countryside,
The fields, the farms, the dirt, the sand.
He howls of these
Multiplicities
To flood, submerge, inundate
The febrile mind in words,
In terms, nouns, verbs to conjugate,
To tickle fancies into fantasies,
Shriek metaphors and similes,
Diddle with the functions
Of prepositions , exclamations,
Punctuations and conjunctions
Leaving us to flee in fear
From this assault upon the ear,
Overwhelmed by lexicography
Seeking pure cognography

Posted by Jan Sand on Fri 23 Mar 2012
Thesauri don't kill prose and poetry. People kill prose and poetry.

Posted by Kevin Maloney on Fri 23 Mar 2012
I never go to the thesaurus looking for blank inspiration. I go to the thesaurus when I know there's a word meaning exactly what I want it to mean, but I can't quite bring it to mind.

Posted by Kevin W. Parker on Fri 23 Mar 2012
Kevin W. Parker stole my thunder, but I'll pitch in a me too, for what it's worth.

Posted by jhm on Sat 24 Mar 2012
I third Kevin Parker. I've always used the Thesaurus to chase down particular words I can't quite retrieve, and more and more as I get older. I have no doubt that finding the word I'm looking instead of settling for second choice improves my writing.

I just had to refresh Captcha about 30 times before I got one I could read. Do others have this problem?

Posted by Denise on Thu 29 Mar 2012
On the subject of thesauri, let me vent about the scarcity of Roget's category-based books these days. Almost all available thesauri today are the pallid "dictionary" kind: greatly inferior to the category-based ones, but eating up all the shelf space at bookstores like McDonald's driving better restaurants into bankruptcy. Even books with "Roget" in the title are now mostly dictionary style; my 1977 Roget's is getting ragged from overuse, but I haven't managed to find a suitable replacement.

Posted by Jim Gardner on Sat 31 Mar 2012
Fun article.

Mike Cope and Nathaniel Campbell are correct. In my case, I rarely use a thesaurus when writing, but I use one constantly when translating.

Writers of formal verse, of course, need lines to scan, and writers of free verse still need the poem to sound good. Compromises are necessary. That's one reason why verse is not an appropriate medium for scholarship, journalism, law, and how-to-books.

Posted by Kent Richmond on Fri 6 Apr 2012