The current issue of Lapham's Quarterly has a long and rather interesting article about the background of Roget's Thesaurus and how it has been viewed by various scholars and authors. Some excerpts:
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.”..Much more at the link. The topic came to mind when I encountered the cartoon embedded at the top. It was above the upper margin of a different cartoon, so the top is cut off. What caught my eye was this awkward phrase:
Peter Mark Roget... 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...
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...
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 thesaurus 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.
"Into the dark night lonely howls lade the blackness and fill a dog's void."What in the world was the cartoonist thinking? "Lade" is a synonym for "burden" or "to fill." I think the cartoonist must have written "Into the dark night lonely howls fill the blackness and fill a dog's void," then noted the repetition and reached for a thesaurus to get a synonym for "fill." Has anyone out there (Brits in particular) encountered the word "lade" used in this fashion?
And finally/lastly/in conclusion this coffee mug:
Also available as a t-shirt, from the Neatoshop.
"Nemi" is a Norwegian cartoon, so my guess is that "lade" is a translation issue. For what it's worth, in Norwegian, I think "lade" is "to load" or "to charge" -- like a battery or a cell phone -- which could make sense in the context.
ReplyDeleteAh... that would make sense. Thankk you.
DeleteNemi isn't this comic strip, however. That would be the comic strip below the one pictured. This one is called Buckles.
DeleteWhoa... you're totally right. I remember seeing the word "Buckles" in the part that got trimmed from the right margin.
DeleteDarn - that spoils a great explanation.
I've removed the original embedded image, trimmed it to remove the misleading "Nemi" part, and reinserted it.
Thanks, teh yoshi.
Anybody in the logistics or legal professions will tell you that 'a bill of lading' is the legal term for a cargo ship's manifest, or what cargo has been taken on board. (And, indeed, other forms of transportation.)
ReplyDeleteWhen you reach the age at which words you have used all your life are relentlessly creeping just outside the periphery of your consciousness, defying your efforts to come up with le mot juste, you really begin to appreciate a thesaurus (not to mention Google for names).
ReplyDeleteThesauruses are not only used by writers, but translators too. I have to say that when working to a deadline, having a thesaurus at hand is very useful when the 'standard' one-to-one literal translation of a word is inappropriate for whatever reason (tone, register, idiom). Or for when I think "Oh, there's a great word in English for this, it's a synonym of XYZ and starts with a D, oh what was that again..."
ReplyDeleteI think a thesaurus is fine as long as you use it correctly: to REMIND yourself of related words. If you pick a word you don't recognize or have used, you will not know its exact connotations and could easily misemploy* it. There's no such thing as an exact synonym.
ReplyDelete*example of bad thesaurusing
It struck me as rather nice, i didn't look at the word lade twice until you mentioned it in your comment. Makes perfect sense to me, i think it was put there because the L's give the line a nice dreary feeling
ReplyDeleteLoneLy howLs Lade the bLackness
To me, if the night is 'laden' with howls rather than 'filled', it also implies that there is something useful which was put there, rather than just something which happened to be there by sheer accident and/or which is good for nothing.
Also, 'laden' has two syllables, making 7 for the middle line of this haiku.
ReplyDeleteoh dear, please excuse that brain fart =P
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