Simon Winchester in The Atlantic editorializes on the history, usefulness, and accuracy of Peter Mark Roget’s lexicography.  He vilifies the crossword puzzle and the the sad span of the net of linguistic mediocrity, and generally makes us all think twice about the whole business, as the contributors over there at The Atlantic like to do.

What has what-we’ve-come-to-call the thesaurus done to our minds?

Roget never imagined, for instance, that an Ohio sophomore majoring in political science might one day use his book to find a word with which to pad out a paragraph in a midterm paper. Roget never envisioned that paperback editions of his work would be stuffed into millions of school backpacks and satchels from Huddersfield to Hobart, or that a barely literate board chairman bound for Liverpool would have his secretary’s volume by his side as he was writing his report to shareholders on the morning express from Euston.

Roget assumed, as he organized his work, that anyone who might chance upon it would be just as clever as he, just as accustomed to precise syntax, to scrupulous grammar, and to confident and impeccable word selection. Armed with this naive set of assumptions, he produced a book that was predicated on the misguided belief that, as he wrote in his introduction, users would guide themselves through the thicket of words by relying on what he grandly termed their “instinctive tact.” Thus there was no need to explain what any word meant—because his users, with all their “tact,” would know that full well already.

…The way the book is arranged makes it all appear easy, a quick solution in an efficient microsecond. And yet, precisely because the users are ill-versed, and because the book makes utterly invalid assumptions about their knowledge, and offers no help at all in discovering what anything means, the word chosen with each presto! is often wrong. Sometimes very wrong. Often slightly wrong. And at the very least, frequently, curiously, and discordantly off. For example, a freshman student of mine, who admitted to using Roget, attempted to improve the phrase “his earthly fingers” by changing it to “his chthonic digits.”

Each time such a wrong is perpetrated by way of Peter Mark Roget, the language, as spoken, written, or read, becomes a little worse, a little more mediocre, and a measure more decayed, disarranged, and unlovely. And that, I suggest, is why all Rogets should be shunned.

Read the full article here.

Personally, I thought I loved my thesaurus.  I didn’t use it to pluck out the brainiest synonym for self-aggrandizement.  I loved it for the bit of free-association it provokes, the diversion of contemplating the fantastic array of nuance in the English language.

But, just as in romance and dinner, I like to know what I’m loving.  Now, thanks to Simon Winchester in The Atlantic, I do.  Be careful out there.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 10:45 am and is filed under *Jamie's Posts, News, The Writing Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.