Thanks, Roget

Thesaurus lovers rejoice! On this day in 1779, one Peter Mark Roget was born in London. Roget was a doctor, he invented a new and improved slide rule, and he studied optics. I knew none of that before I read today Writer’s Almanac. Until this morning, I knew just one thing about Roget: He was a classifier of words, a sorter of terms. He published Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition in 1852.

I am holding in my left hand a tattered paperback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus (Revised Edition, in Dictionary Form). This version has a much shorter title and contains many more words than Roget’s original. It has been with me for nearly thirty years. I’m not sure, but it might be a book I “borrowed” from my father and never returned (sorry, Dad). The green cover is as familiar as Mom’s three-alarm chili. This is one of those books with a permanent home on my bookshelf, not because I refer to it often but because I’m pretty sure the universe would end were it not for good old Roget anchoring one end of my reference book collection. An equally tattered Webster’s New World Dictionary has the other end. These two old friends are books I gaze at often but touch rarely.

Such was not always the case.

Thanks to work begun by Roget, I was highly successful at coming up with wonderful words and turns of phrase in my high school English courses. Actually, “wonderful” is perhaps not quite the right word there; “longer, more complicated, and more deserving of the attention of my somewhat underdeveloped yet overutilized adolescent intellect” is more accurate (but even Roget couldn’t help me find a word to say all that – or maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough). Anyway, let’s agree to call those words and phrases “interesting” and move on.

The point is, I was in the thesaurus a lot. It helped me with my writing, especially poetry assignments. No, I won’t bore you with any old poems. I will tell you that a thesaurus in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. Indiscriminate thesaurus use can turn a simple sentence like “The cow jumped over the moon” to “The ruminant somersaulted through the satellite.” This may seem like an extreme case of abuse, but I’ve seen worse in these editorial trenches. Trust me, sometimes it gets ugly in here.

But let’s think of happier things. For homework, write a pithy and amusing poem using only words you find in the thesaurus, and be certain to recollect that you must render unto Mr. Roget your expressions of profound gratitude when your ode has reached its expiration. Or you could just say, “Thanks, Pete.”