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Re: Thesaurus won't work



To which, after 40-odd years of editing, I ask, Why bother? I find it

hard to believe that any active poster on this list NEEDS a thesaurus;

although, ironically, it's only those who don't need them who dare

safely use them. I've opened my hard copy of Roget perhaps twice in a

dozen years--and with no luck, I might add. A vastly overrated tool, IMO.


Patricia M. Godfrey


Ah, but you miss the main use for a thesaurus:  finding the correct spelling for words that elude you to such an extent that spell checkers cannot guess what you want. I can usually come up with at least one easily spelled synonym for the fugitive word.  I do not anticipate that age will lessen the importance for me of this humble use.

BTW, because of partial spelling-blindness I very much appreciate current-generation spell-checking software that highlights suspect words as I go.  At the same time, as a law professor constantly dealing with strange case names and Latin oddities, I appreciate XyWrite's ability to give me a simple list of words it does not recognize in a file. Why isn't this feature demanded of EVERY word processor and text editor? It is so incredibly efficient to look through a list of unrecognized words and pick out the ones that are misspelled. In theory the on-screen marking of unknown words should provide the same efficiency, but in practice I have trouble preventing the context from providing a corrective for errors. 

Myron Gochnauer 
BA, MA, PhD, LLB, LLM, Keeper of the Dogs