A few stolen minutes out of your day to talk words and communication, because our daily lives are surrounded by the evolution and influence of words. Forget the grammar police. There is so much more to this conversation.
Episode #38 – Thesaurus. Thesauri? What’s the Word? & the Latest in Words You Should Know
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Approximate transcript:
Welcome to episode number 38, where we’ll talk about thesauruses, or thesauri—what is the plural of this word? And the fascinating history of these reference books that often aren’t even in alphabetical order. Right. The alphabets not the only way to categorize your subject matter after all.
But first, here’s…
The Latest in Word, Language & Writing News
So this might not be a story on language per se, but amid all of the coronavirus talk about lockdowns, this was a story that caught my eye. Did you hear the one about the venomous spider loose in between the stacks of books at the Hogwarts—nope, that’s not right—at the University of Michigan library.
Seriously, this is a temporary closure that I think almost everyone can get behind. And to set the record straight, it wasn’t one, nor two, but three venomous Mediterranean recluse spiders. (For notes on “venomous” vs. “poisonous,” see the Words You Should Know podcast, episode 22, once known as Season 2, Episode 10.)
To quote from ABC news, “The Mediterranean recluse hitchhikes with people throughout the world and has been found in 22 states. They like caves and can be found in basements and boiler rooms.”
Story prompt? Nightmare prompt? Spider guards to the words preserved within the hallowed walls of academia? Yikes. Anyhow. Moving on…
In other communications news, journalist / data junkie Ben Blatt, recently published the findings of his statistical analysis of storytelling, looking to great works of literature, from John Steinbeck to Charles Dickens to Jane Austen to Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Amy Tan and beyond, and also contemporary best sellers and even fan fiction.
In short, it was a project to examine the writing advice one hears for powerful storytelling and communications of all sort. Avoid adverbs and stick to more powerful verbs. Don’t use too many exclamation points. Begin with short, direct sentences. And starting with the weather, whether in an email or a novel, doesn’t really accomplish anything but stalling the point.
So, Blatt was off, using using a programming language called Python and a set of tools called the Natural Language Toolkit.
What did he find? Not only that Agatha Christie’s most common words were “inquest,” “alibi,” and “frightful” and that Mark Twain’s were “hearted,” “shucks,” and “satan” (I mean, how Mark Twain is that?), but also that Stephen King and many who might be considered the “greats” of literature are with him when he says he avoids those adverbs.
You can find more details in my show notes:
- “Data Science Reveals Why the Best Business Writers Avoid Certain Words” (Inc.)
- “One Writer Used Statistics to Reveal the Secrets of What Makes Great Writing” (Smithsonian Magazine)
- “’Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve’ Crunches The (Literary) Numbers” (NPR, Pop Culture Happy Hour)
Oh, I could spend so much more time with these findings, and believe me, I will, but I’ll move on to the meat of our episode.
Ooh look, more history and analysis of how we use our language! I would say just kidding, but I’m not… that’s what this show is all about, right?
In today’s…
English Language History & Trivia
Let’s talk about the thesaurus. Whether you use it for your writing or for your crossword puzzles, it’s hard to argue against the power of this language tool.
First things first, what is the plural of this word? Thesauri? Thesauruses? (Who else is imagining some sort of dinosaur right now?)
If you’re using dinosaurs as your model to answer this question, you wouldn’t completely be wrong, but then again, if you’re using an octopus or cactus as your model, you wouldn’t completely be wrong either.
Wait, you were looking for one answer to this question?
The answer is that the plural of “thesaurus” is accepted to be either “thesauri” (“T-H-E-S-A-U-R-I”) or “thesauruses” (“T-H-E-S-A-U-R-U-S-E-S”). Historically, following the Latin rules, “thesauri” was the standard, but modern English has evolved to include “thesauruses” not only as a “casual” or “nonstandard” form but as a standard form in its own right.
Now, “thesaurus” comes from the Greek word that means both “treasure” and “storehouse.” I’m sure the wordsmiths among you might find that a particularly perfect association.
Roget’s Thesaurus was first published in 1852 and hasn’t been out of print since. Why is this a big deal, let’s think on this.
Peter Mark Roget was a Renaissance man of his time. Not only did this guy love chess, bee keeping, and kaleidoscopes, but he also was also a practicing physician, even for a time serving as physician to the Spanish Embassy. He counted among his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Poet Laureate William Wordsworth. He was a part of the discovery that nitrous oxide could be used as an anesthetic, the creation of the London sewage system, and the development of the film industry, among many other pursuits.
So, if you ever play the game of if you could have dinner with any one figure from history, I argue that Dr. Peter Mark Roget should maybe be on your list of considerations.
What I find particularly fascinating about him though, is that while he had an incredibly hard life in terms of his family’s mental health and his own father died when he was only four years old, young Peter coped by making lists. By creating order.
And by the time he was twenty-six years old, he was working on what he called a “reverse dictionary,” a list of synonyms for when the definitions are known but similar words are needed. Yes, this was the thesaurus before it ever gained its official name, but it was indeed Roget who gave it this title, this “treasure house.”
Earlier linguists had used the term referring to Latin and Greek dictionaries in the 1500s, which were written in Latin and Greek.
It was love of diverse disciplines, his endless curiosity about the world, and his desire for order, classification, and bettering oneself that led to the invention of the thesaurus, and after his own death, Roget’s Thesaurus became a family project of sorts, with both his son and grandson continuing the effort.
Fun thesaurus facts:
- Roget’s first thesaurus was arranged by category, not by alphabetical order. Because who says alphabetical order is the only way of organizing research books? (Side note, I’m in the middle of a great book on this subject right now, and I’ll likely be returning to alphabetical order in a future episode.)
- The original 1852 title was “Dr. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases classified and arranged to facilitate the Expression of Ideas and assist in Literary Composition.”
- While Roget began this pursuit in his twenties, his career didn’t allow for him to finish it until he was retired. Roget was seventy-three when it was first published, but he was active in multiple revisions in future editions of the book until his death at ninety-one years old in 1869.
- While Roget’s is the first modern English thesaurus, the concept dates back to ancient Greece, specifically a work called “On Synonyms” by the Greek historian and grammarian Philo of Byblos, published circa the late 1st or early 2nd century, and a Sanskrit grammarian and poet from ancient India named Amarasimha published a thesaurus known as the “Treasury of Amara” in what was likely the 600s. This Sanskrit tome is especially intriguing to me because it was published not as a vocabulary list but as a long poem. How amazing is that?
And I also have a list of Thesaurus jokes in my show notes, because, well, why not? Thank you, Readers Digest.
Language Challenge
So if I started with the question of “what is the plural of ‘thesaurus’”? Let’s make today’s language challenge another question about plural forms. What is the plural of “loaf” as in a “loaf” of bread? Too easy? Maybe. But type it out. Spellcheck won’t help you.
The answers, as always, can be found on my website, at GetAGripOnYourGrammar.com
Personal Update:
May I give a shout-out to all the writing partners out there? What do I mean by “partner”? I’m not talking about co-writers, especially, though those types of partners are awesome too. I’m talking about beta readers, critique partners, writing groups, and all of the partners have in their lives helping them and cheering them on.
As I think I mentioned last time, I have a project that I’ve been thinking about for the past year but not quite taking action on. For the past month or so, I’ve been really going deep into the research and planning about how I could tackle the beast that I’m getting kind of psyched about tackling. Yes, that’s what we writers do, we tackle beats of course! But having sounding boards for bouncing ideas off of is really just priceless. Yes, my literary agent is one of these sounding boards, but there are a number of others in the mix. And they rock.
So if you’re a supporter of writers, go you! If you’re a writer, this pursuit doesn’t have to be lonely. Dreamwork makes the team work. Okay, that might be bordering on cliché these days. Let’s do better. There’s simply power when we work together, because it’s in those moments, our individual and community pursuits inch their ways closer toward becoming realities.
It works well in the end, writers need support.
Sometimes this comes from people. Sometimes it comes from thesauri or thesauruses. It definitely doesn’t come from spiders chasing folks out of libraries. I’m sure any data analysis could agree with that.
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Words. Language. Communications. We’ve got this.