Word for Word

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

Every teacher of composition probably has a few horror stories along these lines. Unlike Bush with his print thesaurus, students these days would more likely consult one online or directly built into their computer’s operating system. The simplicity of using an electronic thesaurus is a double-edged sword, tempting students into quick substitutions without thinking carefully about nuances of word usage. In a critique of thesauruses (and Roget in particular) published in The Atlantic in 2001, Simon Winchester gave the example of a student who “attempted to improve the phrase ‘his earthly fingers’ by changing it to ‘his chthonic digits.’” Elsewhere he calls the thesaurus “a calculator for the lexically lazy: used too often, relied on at all, it will cause the most valuable part of the brain to atrophy, the core of human expression to wither.”

Winchester is quite right to be concerned about the ease of search-and-replace synonymy in the age of the word processor. Unthinking substitutions along the lines of the young Mr. Bush’s “lacerates” can now be multiplied many times over, with lightning speed. Fans of the television show Friends may recall the episode in which the dim-witted Joey Tribbiani discovers the built-in thesaurus in his word-processing program and tries to spruce up a letter of recommendation for his friends’ adoption agency. He thesaurusizes every word, so that the sentence “They are warm, nice people with big hearts” turns into “They are humid, prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps.”

That bit of sitcom silliness has actually turned into a grim reality, now that online content farms use so-called spinning software to modify a source text by automatically swapping out words with ostensible synonyms. (The goal is to create new textual fodder that can be used on websites without search engines like Google suspecting that the content has been duplicated from elsewhere.) I recently came across a particularly ham-handed example on a news aggregator which lifted an article from the Star-Ledger about a looming fight between two congressional candidates. The original said that “the Democratic showdown…will be bloody and fairly evenly matched considering the county machinery behind each candidate.” In the “spun” version, the showdown “will be full of blood and sincerely uniformly suited deliberation the county equipment at the back any candidate.” Sadly, this sort of thesaurus-driven gobbledygook can be found in abundance online, as if Joey and his full-sized aortic pump had taken over the Internet.

If automatic search and replace represents the dark side of synonymy in the digital age, there are plenty of causes for optimism in more sophisticated approaches to contemporary thesaurus making. A thesaurus, like any reference tool, requires active participation from its readers to unlock its potential utility. But one that is well-designed, whether print or digital, also makes that participation enjoyable and enlightening, encouraging the user to do more than take in a quick drive-by of synonyms. In compiling the first English thesaurus, Roget’s hope was that his readers would immerse themselves in a realm of concepts and their linguistic associations. One hundred and sixty years later, there are many novel ways that a thesaurus can provide that kind of immersion in the world of words.

Twenty-first-century reference works seem to be moving inexorably toward an online-only existence, but for the time being we can appreciate the distinct pleasures of both print and electronic creations. The print thesaurus affords a more leisurely stroll through its pages, with possibilities ripe for serendipitous discovery. The electronic versions, on the other hand, may appeal to our “give me a word now” impulse for instant gratification. But they can also stimulate the exploration of language by means of free-flowing user interfaces, with hyperlinks or other navigational tools carrying the user from word to word and from meaning to meaning.

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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