Books of Words, 2: Floppy Thesauri
Sunday, September 12th, 2004 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthWhen I was about ten years old, I announced to my parents that I wanted to be a writer.
They laughed indulgently (which was much better than the response to my wanting to be an archaeologist): but they did buy me a thesaurus.
It was the Penguin Roget, paperback edition, it cost £1.75 (yes, thank you, we did have decimal money by the time I was ten), and it was responsible for a great deal of purple prose. Eventually I learned that a thesaurus is best used (a) sparingly, and (b) in conjunction with a dictionary: precision is more important than poesy.
I've always preferred Roget's rather baroque thematic arrangement -- a whole implied philosophy -- to the simpler A-Z thesauri, which I actually find too prosaic and uninspiring for creative writing, though it's much simpler to use. I do not want fire to be next to finite; I want it to be next to 380. Cold . Even if I have to look up fire in the index to find out where, philosophically-speaking, it fits. ('Organic Matter', of course.)
Recently a terrible thing happened to my Penguin thesaurus. It fell off the sofa and broke.
I was distraught. (Wretched, miserable, tormented.) All the pages were still present, and perhaps the book could be rebound; but it had been so deliciously floppy, so easy to leave open without needing a bookmark or a weight; so flip-through-able. [FX: spends ten minutes trying to find a word for this. Thumbable? But that's not the same. Rifflable? Not a word.] And now? Now, it's a collation of yellowing paper (with occasional annotations in my schoolgirl hand) and hard, buttermilk-coloured, fossilised binding-glue, which gets everywhere.
I set out to find another.
My criteria:
- Roget's-style
- paperback
- full, not abridged
- floppy
- nice font
- indexed
- preferably under £20
My search:
- Borders, Oxford Street. Many nice thesauri, though mostly A-Z, and mainly hardcover. There was one nice Penguin Roget, but it had been tested by so many other people that it was sadly battered, and it was the last one left.
- Waterstones, Oxford Street. A small selection, mainly hardcover, and the only Roget's they had were abridged. I have a few test words, and if they're not in their places -- and, preferably, in the index too -- then the thesaurus isn't what I'm looking for.
- Borders, Charing Cross Road. Interesting selection, but more emphasis on teaching / studying English .
- Foyles, Charing Cross Road. Books! Everywhere! But nothing that was quite right. The best I could find was a huge hardcover edition, £30, utterly perfect except (a) not floppy, (b) too expensive and (c) doubted I could carry it home. (For, as those who know me will appreciate, I had not emerged entirely empty-handed from any of the book emporia I'd visited. And 'twas a dark and stormy night, so I was wrestling with an umbrella, too.)
- Waterstones, Trafalgar Square. Victory! The perfect thesaurus -- excepting the cover, which is a rather offputtingly earnest shade of yellow.
But I can live with that.
It's wonderfully floppy ...
And it's Roget's, updated. I was initially not at all sure about this 'updating' business. But, as the Introduction puts it:
The world has changed since 1852, and Roget's abstract ideas are less relevant to the current mise en scene. Therefore, editors of later editions of Roget's thesaurus have created new categories to house the thousands of new words, objects, concepts, and phrases that have entered the language since then... In contrast to Roget's intellectual abstractions, the categories and lists in Bartlett's reflect the world of computers, science and technology, of television, new medicine, drugs, of fashion and post-modern culture. They represent as well the boom in sports and leisure activities, the worldwide spread of ethnic cuisines, the world as a global village.
As far as I can work out, they started from scratch. The Penguin Roget was a 1962 edition based on the original 1852 categories. There used to be six classes, from Abstract Relations via Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition (1) and Volition (2) to Affections (or, to put it another way, from 1. Existence to 990. Temple). There are now twenty-four general groups that follow what the introduction says, optimistically, is a 'fairly logical order', from Foundations of Knowledge to Condition: from 1. Anthropology to 848. Adversity.
It is a little easier to find things; and the layout is marvellously clear, with good use of fonts, sample quotations for context(385. Pursuit We seek him here, we seek him there / Those Frenchies seek him everywhere ...) and -- a feature that I really liked in my A-Z thesaurus -- sidebar lists of relevant terms (e.g. architectural elements, types of sailing ship, phobias by subject).
It knows all about malefic, and glairy, and shrive. And the Chunnel, ET, the lunatic fringe.
But most of all, it's a book that makes me want to write.
I have the strangest resistance to throwing away my Penguin Thesaurus, symbol of a great deal of angst and preciousness over the last few decades: but I believe that Bartlett's and I will be very happy together.
They laughed indulgently (which was much better than the response to my wanting to be an archaeologist): but they did buy me a thesaurus.
It was the Penguin Roget, paperback edition, it cost £1.75 (yes, thank you, we did have decimal money by the time I was ten), and it was responsible for a great deal of purple prose. Eventually I learned that a thesaurus is best used (a) sparingly, and (b) in conjunction with a dictionary: precision is more important than poesy.
I've always preferred Roget's rather baroque thematic arrangement -- a whole implied philosophy -- to the simpler A-Z thesauri, which I actually find too prosaic and uninspiring for creative writing, though it's much simpler to use. I do not want fire to be next to finite; I want it to be next to 380. Cold . Even if I have to look up fire in the index to find out where, philosophically-speaking, it fits. ('Organic Matter', of course.)
Recently a terrible thing happened to my Penguin thesaurus. It fell off the sofa and broke.
I was distraught. (Wretched, miserable, tormented.) All the pages were still present, and perhaps the book could be rebound; but it had been so deliciously floppy, so easy to leave open without needing a bookmark or a weight; so flip-through-able. [FX: spends ten minutes trying to find a word for this. Thumbable? But that's not the same. Rifflable? Not a word.] And now? Now, it's a collation of yellowing paper (with occasional annotations in my schoolgirl hand) and hard, buttermilk-coloured, fossilised binding-glue, which gets everywhere.
I set out to find another.
My criteria:
- Roget's-style
- paperback
- full, not abridged
- floppy
- nice font
- indexed
- preferably under £20
My search:
- Borders, Oxford Street. Many nice thesauri, though mostly A-Z, and mainly hardcover. There was one nice Penguin Roget, but it had been tested by so many other people that it was sadly battered, and it was the last one left.
- Waterstones, Oxford Street. A small selection, mainly hardcover, and the only Roget's they had were abridged. I have a few test words, and if they're not in their places -- and, preferably, in the index too -- then the thesaurus isn't what I'm looking for.
- Borders, Charing Cross Road. Interesting selection, but more emphasis on teaching / studying English .
- Foyles, Charing Cross Road. Books! Everywhere! But nothing that was quite right. The best I could find was a huge hardcover edition, £30, utterly perfect except (a) not floppy, (b) too expensive and (c) doubted I could carry it home. (For, as those who know me will appreciate, I had not emerged entirely empty-handed from any of the book emporia I'd visited. And 'twas a dark and stormy night, so I was wrestling with an umbrella, too.)
- Waterstones, Trafalgar Square. Victory! The perfect thesaurus -- excepting the cover, which is a rather offputtingly earnest shade of yellow.
But I can live with that.
It's wonderfully floppy ...
And it's Roget's, updated. I was initially not at all sure about this 'updating' business. But, as the Introduction puts it:
The world has changed since 1852, and Roget's abstract ideas are less relevant to the current mise en scene. Therefore, editors of later editions of Roget's thesaurus have created new categories to house the thousands of new words, objects, concepts, and phrases that have entered the language since then... In contrast to Roget's intellectual abstractions, the categories and lists in Bartlett's reflect the world of computers, science and technology, of television, new medicine, drugs, of fashion and post-modern culture. They represent as well the boom in sports and leisure activities, the worldwide spread of ethnic cuisines, the world as a global village.
As far as I can work out, they started from scratch. The Penguin Roget was a 1962 edition based on the original 1852 categories. There used to be six classes, from Abstract Relations via Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition (1) and Volition (2) to Affections (or, to put it another way, from 1. Existence to 990. Temple). There are now twenty-four general groups that follow what the introduction says, optimistically, is a 'fairly logical order', from Foundations of Knowledge to Condition: from 1. Anthropology to 848. Adversity.
It is a little easier to find things; and the layout is marvellously clear, with good use of fonts, sample quotations for context(385. Pursuit We seek him here, we seek him there / Those Frenchies seek him everywhere ...) and -- a feature that I really liked in my A-Z thesaurus -- sidebar lists of relevant terms (e.g. architectural elements, types of sailing ship, phobias by subject).
It knows all about malefic, and glairy, and shrive. And the Chunnel, ET, the lunatic fringe.
But most of all, it's a book that makes me want to write.
I have the strangest resistance to throwing away my Penguin Thesaurus, symbol of a great deal of angst and preciousness over the last few decades: but I believe that Bartlett's and I will be very happy together.
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no subject
Date: Sunday, September 12th, 2004 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, September 12th, 2004 06:24 am (UTC)And the list of shops makes me want to go. And drop Morten off somewhere since he will most likely not understand the need to enter every bookstore. And stay in each for a considerable amount of time. And in some cases go back.
no subject
Date: Sunday, September 12th, 2004 01:39 pm (UTC)