Word: thesauruses
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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...
...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 added to the new edition of the thesaurus, right after "biased, twisted, jaundiced." Women are no longer listed as a sub-category of mankind but of humankind. And among the exemplars of "excellence," "superman" has been joined by "wonderwoman...
...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 of this approach is a large supply of environmental words (recycling...
Established in 1923 with little more than a Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary and a world almanac, the Time Inc. library has grown into the largest facility of its kind in the U.S., with 25 professional librarians and 63 clerks, newspaper markers and indexers. Last year it processed 150,576 queries from the company's various operations, 58,839 from TIME alone. The library contains half a million information folders on people, companies and news topics, 87,000 books and government publications and a running collection of several hundred periodicals. About the only thing it lacks is space...
...dynamic" and "relevant" opening; write a rejection on a business proposal with sympathy and understanding. One corrective exercise asks, "Did you find rewriting the cliches easy?" At $89.95 each, the firm has sold upwards of 10,000 Power Writing kits, each of which contains workbooks, a dictionary, a thesaurus and four audio cassettes. American Telephone and Telegraph has budgeted an estimated $2 million to provide a customized version of the Power Writing course for 20 Bell System offices throughout the nation...