It is only a fiction if one holds fast to the notion that synonyms must be exactly equivalent in their meaning, usage, and connotation. Of course, under this strict view, there will never be any “perfect” synonyms. No word does exactly the job of another. In the words of the linguist Roy Harris, “If we believe there are instances where two expressions cannot be differentiated in respect of meaning, we must be deceiving ourselves.”
But the synonyms that we find gathered together in a thesaurus are typically more like siblings that share a striking resemblance. “Brotherly” and “fraternal,” for instance. Or “sisterly” and “sororal.” They may correspond well enough in meaning, but that should not imply that one can always be substituted for another. Consulting a thesaurus to find these closely related sets of words is only the first step for a writer looking for le mot juste: the peculiar individuality of each would-be synonym must then be carefully judged. Mark Twain knew the perils of relying on the family resemblance of words: “Use the right word,” he wrote, “not its second cousin.”
No matter how tempting the metaphor, though, words are not people. We cannot run genetic tests on them to determine their degrees of kinship, and a thesaurus is not a pedigree chart. We can, nonetheless, look to it as a guidebook to help us travel around the semantic space of our shared lexicon, grasping both the similarities that bond words together and the nuances that differentiate them.
This was, in fact, more or less the mission of Peter Mark Roget when he published the first edition of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in the spring of 1852. He organized sets of synonyms according to one thousand categories, neatly arrayed in a two-column format. Roget was utterly obsessive about making lists, keeping a notebook full of them as early as eight years old, and by age twenty-six he had compiled a hundred-page draft of what would become his greatest work. List making was a welcome relief from his chronic depression and tumultuous family life; it was a way of imposing order on a messy reality. In his autobiography, he would not bring himself to explore his personal troubles; instead he dispassionately noted places he visited, moving days, birthdays, and death days. He called it “List of Principal Events.”
In his biography of Roget, The Man Who Made Lists, Joshua Kendall argues that Roget created a “paracosm,” or alternate universe, in the orderly lists of words he began making in childhood: “both a replica of the real world as well as a private, imaginary world.” The thesaurus that would grow out of the lists was even more hyperorderly. The unruliness of language—and the world of concepts that words denote—could be tamed in his pages. When he discovered that he actually had 1,002 concepts listed instead of his planned 1,000, he simply condensed two entries to achieve his round number: “Absence of Intellect” became 450a and “Indiscrimination,” 465a.
Roget’s thesaurus was crucially a conceptual undertaking, and, according to Roget’s deeply held religious beliefs, a tribute to God’s work. His efforts to create order out of linguistic chaos harks back to the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, who was charged with naming all that was around him, thereby creating a perfectly transparent language. It was, according to the theology of St. Augustine, a language that would lose its perfection with the Fall of Man, and then irreparably shatter following construction of the Tower of Babel. By Roget’s time, Enlightenment ideals had taken hold, suggesting that scientific pursuits and rational inquiry could discover antidotes to Babel, if not a return to the perfect language of Adam. Though we no longer cling so tightly to these Enlightenment notions about language in our postmodern age, we still carry with us Roget’s legacy, the view that language can somehow be wrangled and rationalized by fitting the lexicon into tidy conceptual categories.
Roget intended for his readers to immerse themselves in the orderly classification system of the thesaurus so that they might better understand the full possibilities for human expression. As Roget first conceived it, the book did not even have an alphabetical index—he included it later as an afterthought. His goal, then, was not to provide a simple method of replacing synonym A with synonym B but instead to encourage a fuller understanding of the world of ideas and the language representing it.
In England, the Thesaurus was widely praised upon publication. The Westminster Review lauded the work’s “ideal classification,” which meant that “the whole Thesaurus may be read through, and not prove dry reading either.” An international edition would eventually popularize his work in the United States as well, becoming a household item in the 1920s during the crossword craze. Eventually “Roget” would become synonymous with the thesaurus itself, even if many of the contemporary reference works that bear his name share little resemblance to his careful classification system.
More than a century and a half later, the impact of Roget’s creation continues to reverberate in the proliferation of thesauruses, both in print and electronic varieties. Yet the thesaurus has also come under fire time and time again—what does it have to offer the modern writer?
by Ben Zimmer, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
