Word for Word

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

The poet Mark Doty was similarly forthright in a 2011 interview:

If you write a poem with the aid of a thesaurus, you will almost inevitably look like a person wearing clothing chosen by someone else. I am not sure that a poet should even own one of the damn things.

Some writers counsel that a thesaurus should, at the very least, be kept at arm’s length, like Billy Collins’ “copy up on a high shelf.” When the Guardian asked Irish novelist Roddy Doyle for his rules for aspiring writers, one of them was as follows:

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine.

Margaret Atwood, on the other hand, supplied her own cardinal rule of writing to the Guardian: “You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality.”

A young Sylvia Plath was more enthusiastic, calling her thesaurus the book that she “would rather live with on a desert isle than a Bible.” She relied on her copy of Roget heavily when composing the poems in her first collection, The Colossus, though she apparently outgrew her thesaurus dependence by the time she wrote her famous Ariel poems. Dylan Thomas, Plath’s contemporary, leaned heavily on a thesaurus when writing his later poetry, as researchers have discovered by analyzing his manuscripts. For Thomas, his thesaurus likely did serve as a crutch of sorts, since he was in the grips of alcoholism and his writing was deteriorating. We can think of Thomas’ case as an object lesson in approaching all things in moderation, be it the bottle or the thesaurus.

To be sure, the potential for abuse is a constant danger, especially for eager students who may go overboard when hunting for impressive words. When I speak to student groups about the use and misuse of the thesaurus, I like to open with a cautionary tale. The story, I explain, is told in the memoir of a prominent American politician, recounting his experience as a new student at a prestigious Eastern boarding school:

I remember the first paper I wrote. I thought I was in over my head, so I consulted the Roget’s Thesaurus Mother had given me, searching for some big, impressive words. I wanted to show off for my Eastern professors. It was a story about emotions, and I was trying to find a unique way to describe “tears” running down my face. My discussion of “lacerates” falling from my eyes did catch the teacher’s attention, but not in the way I had hoped. The paper came back with a “zero” marked so emphatically that it left an impression visible all the way through to the back of the blue book. So much for trying to sound smart.

My student audience can usually guess pretty quickly that the memoirist in question is George W. Bush. The former president uses the anecdote in A Charge to Keep to illustrate his fish-out-of-water status attending the Phillips Academy prep school at Andover, and also to own up to his much-derided linguistic shortcomings. In a 2000 profile of Bush in Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy even used the episode as circumstantial evidence that he was dyslexic, quoting an expert as saying that his confusion over word choice suggested that “he really didn’t understand the language.” The simpler explanation is that he didn’t understand how to use the thesaurus his mother gave him, and thus got tripped up by the homography of “tears.”

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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