Word: roget
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...woman updates Roget...
What is a woman? A "petticoat, skirt, moll, broad," according to one recent U.S. edition of Roget's Thesaurus. Also "the fair sex, girlie, distaff side, Venus, nymph, wench, grisette and bit of fluff." Such archaisms have a kind of antique charm for veteran Rogetophiles, but new times demand new stereotypes. Accordingly, the British publishing firm of Longman advertised in the London Times Educational Supplement for an editor to update its standard 1962 version of Roget's. The result, out last month after more than three years of work, brought some shocked reviews. Cried the London Sunday Times...
...zonker is Susan Lloyd, 41, onetime librarian and modern-language teacher, who answered the Longman advertisement and got the job. Her main task was to update Roget's often Victorian language, deleting some of the fustier phrases, adding or redefining 20,000 others, including, for example, Watergate, streaking, hype and quadraphonic sound. "A modern man or woman," she says, "may work as an ombudsman, a psephologist, a spokesperson, a gogo dancer or a deejay." But the disturbed newspaper reaction came from the fact that Lloyd's updating featured an assault on sexism. Indeed, the word sexist has been...
...Peter Roget was sympathetic to both philosophical approaches. An English physician of Swiss ancestry, he invented a slide rule, did basic optical research on what was to become movie film, and spent half a century intermittently listing words according to six quasi-scientific categories of meaning: abstract relations, volition, affections, and so on. But when he first published his thesaurus in 1852, his goal was partly the Utopian search for a universal language. Editor Lloyd, who once taught English in Uganda, faintly echoes that tone. "The new edition exhibits my interests," she says. "It was bound to." One result...
...television--have at least as many detractors as advocates. The chorus of critics of the godawful tube swells measurably with every September's new harvest of sitcoms, and their dirge, for good reason usually, is deafeningly loud. Television has had enough evil-sounding adjectives attached to it to intimidate Roget, and the articles on the T.V. drug don't just proliferate, they pullulate. And one has to feel we have scaled the pinnacle of absurdity when T.V. performs a dialogue between self and soul and covers the trial of a young felon who blames his crime on T.V. derangement...