In praise of Roget's Thesaurus
January 25th 2008 04:18
I inherited a Roget’s Thesaurus from my late grandfather. It has one of those hard-covers made from cloth and the pages are yellowed from years of patient use. My grandfather’s signature is inked in the flourish of his handwriting in fountain pen on the opening page with the date 10-3-36. Opposite the title page is a replication of ‘the facsimile of the first page of the MS. Classified catalogue of words completed by Dr P M Roget in 1805, which was the germ of the Thesaurus.’ It displays the word Existence written in fountain pen with Dr Roget’s enumerations of the meaning beneath.
Despite the fact that I hardly ever – much to my personal disappointment, have the need to use it, I am rather attached to this old book. Since all my writing takes place on my laptop, I simply have to right click for synonyms and I am offered a range of alternatives which I can just click on. Whilst this function (godbless Microsoft Word) has assisted me to cut down the amount of time consumed with paging through the index at the back of the thesaurus, finding the corresponding meaning and number and then turning to the right page and wading through long lists of words, I do nurture a nagging sense that my gain is twirled around a corresponding loss.
Time, in this day and age with deadlines looming, is of the essence. We all want quick answers, swift solutions. We all feel the need to be wireless, internet-connected anywhere anytime so we can look up Serbian for ‘We have run out of pickled onions,’ if one happens to be writing a story about Serbian cocktail waitresses. I have, just like everyone else, become addicted to speed and as a result have lost the little patience I had for working things out manually, or researching a topic by actually going to a library. Even opening the thesaurus these days feels like too much to ask. And yet. When one is looking for the perfect word, and Microsoft Office offers no alternatives, or a handful which are just not quite right, there is one and only one solution: good old Roget's. There is something patient, old-worldly, even Jane Austen-ish about making one’s way to the right page to search for an answer that does justice to the idea I am sculpting. I try to remember that searching for the perfect word, like spiritual enlightenment - like all things worth seeking, takes time.
While life may have become virtually entirely virtual, and there are intimations that even books will be read on laptops instead of sensually, viscerally on the printed page, I hold out hope that we never reach a time when a Roget’s Thesaurus, the kind my grandfather passed on to me, will be a museum piece. An anachronism, symbolic only of a waste of precious time.
www.joannefedler.com
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Comment by Michaelie
Flick Wit
Sounds like you have a real treasure there.
Michaelie
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