It’s part of the educational lexicon – written by a polymath named Peter Mark Roget in his retirement years as an attempt to organize the supreme kingdom of language.
But when we look at the Thesaurus, us non-polymaths, we just see pages of words listed alphabetically and next to them, their synonyms, right? Wrong. There’s the problem, argues Simon Winchester, there’s no such thing as an exact synonym. And Roget would be rolling or undulating or rising and falling in his grave if he knew his book were being thumbed thru by students exchanging the word “mad” with “round the bend.”
Roget, Winchester says, was a good person who was moved by the complexities of the world. His Thesaurus was in part a way for him to categorize ideas and share them with society. But somewhere along the way, Roget’s dreams and our modern realities forked, and his treasured tome is our quick fix method to word substitution. Are our habits dumbing the whole English language down?
(Hosted by Neal Conan)
Guests:
Simon Winchester, author of a new article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly entitled “Roget and his Brilliant, Unrivaled, Malign, and Detestable Thesaurus.” He’s also the author of The Professor and The Madman.”