A Wordy Christmas

Back in May I posted about my trusty Roget's thesaurus, which I relied on all throughout high school, college, and graduate school and which is never far from reach as I write my novels. The pages are dog-eared and the labels on the thumb-index tabs have fallen off; the contents finally separated from the cover (in one bound chunk, thank goodness). I've tried using newer thesauruses, even on-line ones, but I absolutely HATE the alphabetically-ordered versions. I much prefer Roget's original scheme, where words are organized by category. It's so much easier to browse and find exactly what I'm looking for when I can follow trails of related words. I swore I'd never abandon that maroon-covered book, no matter how tattered it became.

Well, my family had other plans.

When my husband asked my daughter what she thought I might like for Christmas, she suggested a new thesaurus. Knowing my tastes in the matter, my husband searched high and low to find one organized by category. None of the brick-and-mortar stores carried it; he had to order it on-line. He warned me not to open the box that would be arriving.

When I found the box from Barnes and Noble on the doorstep a few days before Christmas, I figured it was the thick cookbook I had mentioned a few weeks earlier--the box was the perfect size. I was kind of bummed, thinking I had guessed my present. I was all ready to feign surprise as I opened the wrapped book on Christmas morning...and found I didn't have to pretend! I was, in fact, quite pleased. The 2009 edition of the thesaurus contains many new words added over the last twenty years. The type is easier on my eyes and I don't have to worry about pages detaching from the spine as I turn them! Husband found the perfect present for his geeky wife.

The new thesaurus sits beside me on the desk now when I write. I've retired the old one, but refuse to discard it. Saying goodbye to that old friend--comrade, buddy, companion--would be too painful. A memento of the first half of my writing life, it can rest in peace on my bookshelf, proud of its long service and satisfied with a job well done.

Now, if only my husband could find me book of plot twists... 

The Man Behind the Lists

After my post on Peter Roget and his thesaurus last week, my father-in-law alerted me to something I'd never heard before--that Roget suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and possibly high-functioning Asperger's syndrome. This aspect of his personality is examined in a new biography of Roget, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness and the Creation of 'Roget's Thesaurus,' by Joshua Kendall. A good deal of depression and mental illness afflicted Roget's family; Kendall views Roget's obsessive list-making as "a heroic defense mechanism," an attempt to order the chaos of his life and keep a grip on his mental stability. The writer of the NYT review of the biography points out, however, that if Roget did suffer from Asperger's, the list-making was not so much a conscious effort but an "involuntary part of who he was." In any case, the biography looks interesting and is definitely going into my TBR pile. The possibility of illness underlying Roget's efforts in a sense humanizes his cerebral masterpiece and is an example of how good things can often result from unfortunate circumstances. (And thanks to my father-in-law for prompting me to delve a bit further into Roget's life.)

Ode to a Thesaurus

Today I thought I'd participate in the Booking Through Thursday meme about books. Each Thursday this site posts a question about books and reading; participants copy the question to their blogs, answer it, then link back. It's a lot of fun--check it out!

This week's question is:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

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I could not write without my thesaurus. Seriously.

My thirty-year old hardback copy of Roget's Thesaurus sits within arm's reach on my desk every time I write. A talisman, perhaps, or simply a visual reminder that I have written before and can write again. It functions not as a static repository of flowery, obscure synonyms with which to prettify my prose, but as a catalyst to my imagination and sieve for my expression. Often times as I'm writing, I'll have an idea of what I want to say, but haven't completely formulated my thoughts. I'll choose a word from the sentence I envision, look it up in the thesaurus, and begin reading the entries for it. Either a word will jump out at me and my thoughts will crystallize around it, or else I will realize that the word I first envisioned really doesn't capture what I want to say. Then the thesaurus offers the invaluable service of providing me with related words that I can explore. I'm very picky about the words I use; they must not only be precise in meaning, but contribute to the "sound" and flow of the sentence. I'll rewrite sentences over and over until sound and meaning mesh. If for some reason I must write without my thesaurus, it's a much more difficult and time-consuming process.

I've had the same hardback copy of Roget's International Thesaurus for decades now. The spine is cracked, some of the pages loose; the little stickers with the entry numbers have fallen off most of the tabs. I've tried to use a newer copy, but it's just not the same. Since the thesaurus is an idea generator for me, I can't use the newer, alphabetically organized ones. I love how in the original thesaurus words are group according to ideas and there's a progression to the order of entries in the book. And forget the online versions--they are much too spare for what I need them to do.

My favorite page in the thesaurus is the short biography of its British compiler, Peter Mark Roget (1799-1869). Did you know Roget was actually a medical doctor? He graduated from medical school at the age of nineteen and made a name for himself researching such subjects as pulmonary consumption and the effects of laughing gas. He established a charity clinic in London in 1810 and contributed his services there free for eighteen years. Roget became a Fellow of the Royal Society and served as its secretary for over twenty years. He lectured widely on medical subjects, but his interests were not limited to medicine. According to this biography, he devised a slide rule and worked on perfecting a calculating machine; he wrote articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica; he designed an inexpensive pocket chessboard; in 1828 he headed a commission to study the water supply of London and wrote the first paper of its kind advocating pollution control.

In 1848 began preparing his thesaurus for publication. He'd begun cataloguing and organizing words according to their meanings in 1805; the first printed edition of his catalog appeared in 1852. He titled it Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. That's exactly what I use it for and thank this remarkable man for his efforts.

A hardbound copy of Webster's New World Dictionary and a thick Harrap's French and English Dictionary keep my old thesaurus company on my writing desk. As for writing books, I have a good number, some of which I can recommend, but that's a subject for another post. Anyway, think of the remarkable Mr. Roget next time you open your thesaurus.

(I wonder how many different ways there are to say "geek"? There's got to be one there that describes me!)