Word: roget
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eight-foot-tall naked man off the ceiling one Sunday morning in October. "Only one," I responded. My friends and I had just thrown Harvard's most outlandish, sensational, refulgent party this side of Adams House--a party so incredible, in fact, that I had to page through my Roget's Thesaurus to find the proper word to describe it. And I was saddened by the thought that ours might be the only such event I would ever experience at this school where most room parties are about as exciting as your aunt's collection of porcelain figurines...
BOOKS Whatever it is, Roget's has a word...
That is because that word is forever linked to Peter Mark Roget, the man who practically invented it. An English physician and lifelong logophile, Roget was 73 in 1852 when he published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. Today Roget's International Thesaurus still hews to its promise. It is the best of its kind, a veritable arsenal of words and phrases with their synonyms, antonyms and related terms, all classified and organized to help writers and speakers say clearly what they mean...
...fourth edition of Roget's was published in 1977, but the English vocabulary has so ballooned since then that a fifth was necessary. At $16.95 for 325,000 words and phrases, the new Roget's is a bargain. Lexicographer Robert L. Chapman has revised and reordered many of Roget's 1,000 or so mainly abstract category headings (Existence, Relation, Quantity) and made them more accessible. To these he has added 31 new topics, including Fitness, Exercise, Substance Abuse, Space Travel, Computer Science and the Environment (listing more than 100 pollutants), though some of these are rearrangements and expansions derived...
...Roget's also brims with the latest cliches and dirty words and an up-to-date compilation of slang and jargon; but it makes no pretense at distinguishing between the useful and the awful. Where the fourth edition labels slang as such, the fifth prefers "nonformal," an ambiguous term at best. The innocent "flaky" is nonformal -- but so is the vulgar "screw." The Black English verb "dis" (short for disrespect) is nonformal; so is "deep doo-doo," slang for predicament. What is even more puzzling is Roget's failure to draw distinctions between the "nonformal" and the downright unacceptable...