Re: Subject: Thesaurus won't work

[Patrick Cox pdcox@xxxxxxxx]

"There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who
separate the world into two kinds of people and the kind
who don't."

Monty Python

K didn't think you were impugning anybody.
In fact, I know lots of editor types who
never mispell or forget a word. I can barely
comprehend it however.

Patrick

-----Original Message-----
From: "Patricia M. Godfrey" 
Sent: Dec 4, 2005 1:20 PM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Subject: Thesaurus won't work

I didn't intend to impugn anyone's method of working. If you find
thesauri useful, by all means use them. I don't, and I have had good
reason, over my editing career, to deplore their misuse.

flash wrote:

 >To those who think they need a thesaurus, I recommend Fowler's article
 >Elegant Variation.

And Patrick Cox, that he has a friend who

 ≫says, in fact, that he can tell when a writer has used a thesaurus.≪
 >
It is those writers who have, perhaps, made me look with a jaundiced eye
at thesauri. They sit down at their keyboard to compose a text and
presently say to themselves: "Oh, that's a plain word. Let's find a
fancier one"; and then they go to the thesaurus and pick out some word
that they've never used (or possibly even HEARD) before and stick it in
their prose, with no awareness of its history, its connotation, or the
idiomatic and syntactical principles governing its use. The resulting
brainchild resembles (to use language usually reserved for equines)
something "by Dogberry out of Mrs. Malaprop."

Needless to say, nobody on this list (at least, no active posters; I
cannot tell about the lurkers) would ever do that.

Then too, a thesaurus, or even an ordinary dictionary, is to words what
a Who's Who entry is to persons or a stuffed critter in a glass case to
a real animal. (The OED, which is sui generis, would be like a good,
3-vol. life and letters or the live critter in a good zoo or ecological
park.) I want to encounter words live on their native heath. That's why,
when I find myself groping for a word (yes, I too do so, and more as I
get older), I'm likely to go to a dictionary of quotations or to ask
myself: "Who has written on this subject? Do I have anything of his or
hers to hand?" and go look there.

Flash also wrote:

 >"Why must we have sufficient memory to retain the smallest details of
 >what has happened to us, and yet not enough to recollect how many times
 >we have recounted them to the same person?" --la Rochfoucauld
 ≫
 >
Ouch! Touch�. Or to vary the trope, right between wind and water.

Patricia M. Godfrey