Word: roget
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...Finley arms her students with a dictionary and a Roget's Thesaurus, finds that both become thoroughly thumbed as the children seek synonyms to fit the rigid line scheme, stretching their vocabularies. To keep them searching, she bans such overworked words as fine, nice, pretty and good. Mrs. Finley is not alone in trying to teach writing in 17 hard syllables: the National Council of Teachers of English reports that haiku are turning up in classrooms throughout the country. Creating a haiku, teachers have found, expands a child's imagery, provides a quick sense of accomplishment because...
...speaker himself bespeak his own participation in "all that was lovely, false and weak." Some of Freeman's lines are gems; only once or twice does his language run away from him and lead an incommunicable life of its own. I offer as a prize my personal copy of Roget's Thesaurus to anyone who can tell me what kind of sky a "favrile...
Among the other originals: Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Madame Delphine Delamare, the faithless young wife of a middle-aged doctor who had studied medicine under Flaubert's father); Edgar Allan Foe's Marie Roget (Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful clerk in a tobacconist's shop Poe patronized); Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Deacon William Brodie, by day a respectable Edinburgh town councilman who at night led a notorious gang of thieves and kept two mistresses). Most of them were interesting people; some were fascinating. But they all have one thing...
Almost as soon as Father Roget reaches Indo-China as a French army chaplain, his religious certainties begin to waver. Riding through the crushing heat of the jungle to a front-line outpost, he passes a ruined pagoda, and is horrified by his sudden vision of his own God "dying in the grasp of the foul, green fungus, speckled with the disease of decay." At the front Colonel Lejeune, a magnificent soldier, tells him with cold insolence that he would have preferred reinforcements to a priest. The French are corroded by defeatism, many of the soldiers are themselves Communists...
...this point the priest hardly seems worth saving, but Novelist Hardy gives him one more chance. During a retreat from the victorious Communists, an officer is hit by machine-gun bullets and begs for the priest. Again fear seizes Roget, but this time the colonel unexpectedly helps him find his soul. Standing beside the priest, Lejeune says with great compassion: "All right. Go now. Don't crawl. Walk out to him." When Roget goes to the dying man, it is the beginning of his return to faith and self-respect...