I woke up one morning with one thought. I needed a new thesaurus, and I needed it now. I hastened over to Barnes and Noble, and was greeted by a plethora of new thesauri. I chose the thesaurus pictured to the left for several reasons.
First, it was not just any thesaurus. It was The Original Roget's International Thesaurus, Revised and Updated. Actually I thought I was buying the latest incarnation of my old one--also pictured to the left.
The words MOST COMPREHENSIVE, DEFINITIVE and UP-TO-DATE were emblazoned on the front cover. This was a selling point.
It was big and heavy, with the mouthwatering info that there were more than 330,000 words and phrases within...divided up into 1,075 categories--
That 'category' feature should have alerted me--
As should have the proclamation on the back cover that this thesaurus considered the habit of putting the words into alphabetical order hopelessly outdated.
But, blinded by the abundance of words within, I snapped the behemoth up.
I raced home, eager and stress-free. I looked forward to settling on my couch, with a cup of hot chai and the cat, to play with my brand new thesaurus. Heck, I'd even break out the macadamias....
I was magnificently disappointed. I should have looked within before I dragged it home.
This thesaurus turned out to be an indecipherably pretentious piece of inflated ego. Just think of the concept say, of hiring a designer to decorate a perfectly pleasant cafeteria. Or handing your six year old the plans for the Taj Mahal. Or thinking it's somehow interesting to climb Mt. Everest wearing stilettos.
Among the many difficulties negotiating the book there is the most important fact that finding your word in the first place, involves guessing which category the editors think it should be in. The categories are numerous, and involve long numbers--wrong doing, for instance (654.05-655.05) or vice (652.03-654.04).
There are instructions, of course, pages and pages of them.
I don't want to read page one of instructions in order to use my thesaurus.
So, while my chai got cold, and my cat howled in dismay, I got back in my car, drove back to Barnes and Noble, and this time picked out the thesaurus that boasted it was arranged in alphebetical order, and furthermore, included the words 'quick and easy access', on the cover
And I lived happily ever after.
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