From the "Word for Word"
feature at
Lapham's Quarterly:
Qualms about the proper use of the thesaurus go back to Roget’s original. An anonymous review in the September 1852 issue of The Athenaeum voiced the concern that the thesaurus would simply be used as a “crutch” for writers, who would be better off avoiding “the frequent recurrence to a work of this kind.” The view of it as a mere crutch persists to this day, especially among writers of fiction and poetry who see the frequent consultation of it as somehow impeding natural expression. Consider this pronouncement from Stephen King in a 1986 piece for The Writer:
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesauÂrus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
The poet Mark Doty was similarly forthright in a 2011 interview:
If you write a poem with the aid of a thesaurus, you will almost inevitably look like a person wearing clothing chosen by someone else. I am not sure that a poet should even own one of the damn things.
[...]
In a critique of thesauruses (and Roget in particular) published in The Atlantic in 2001, Simon Winchester gave the example of a student who “attempted to improve the phrase ‘his earthly fingers’ by changing it to ‘his chthonic digits.’” Elsewhere he calls the thesaurus “a calculator for the lexically lazy: used too often, relied on at all, it will cause the most valuable part of the brain to atrophy, the core of human expression to wither.”
[...]
If automatic search and replace represents the dark side of synonymy in the digital age, there are plenty of causes for optimism in more sophisticated approaches to contemporary thesaurus making. A thesaurus, like any reference tool, requires active participation from its readers to unlock its potential utility. But one that is well-designed, whether print or digital, also makes that participation enjoyable and enlightening, encouraging the user to do more than take in a quick drive-by of synonyms. In compiling the first English thesaurus, Roget’s hope was that his readers would immerse themselves in a realm of concepts and their linguistic associations. One hundred and sixty years later, there are many novel ways that a thesaurus can provide that kind of immersion in the world of words. [...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:
William Bennett engages in an awe-inspiring feat of logical contortion to argue that the epithets hurled at Congressman John Lewis over the weekend prove that racism in America is dead:
That these things are even remotely newsworthy leads me to one conclusion: Racism in America is dead. We had slavery, then we had Jim Crow — and now we have the occasional public utterance of a bad word. Real racism has been reduced to de minimis levels, while charges of racism seem to increase.
Leaving aside the issue of Bennett's compulsion to declare racism irrelevant in today's America, isn't the logical extension of his argument that anti-health care teabaggers are of de minimis (his words) importance as well? I mean, using his logic, if their racial insults are irrelevant, aren't they irrelevant too?
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