Word: thesauruses
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Died. Frank Wilson Braden. 76. cigar-puffing circus press agent, a walking, talking thesaurus of big-top ballyhoo to whom clowns were not clowns but rather "red-nosed, chalk-faced worshipers of the bluebird of happiness." who variously trumpeted the thrills of the Gentry. Sells-Floto, Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey, and Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers circuses for half a century; of pneumonia; in Providence...
...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...
Your writer must have searched his soul and thesaurus long and hard before referring to Lyricist Alan Lerner's succession of therapists as a "pride of analysts." Pride of lions, yes; brace of quail, covey of partridges, indeed; but surely there can be no exact usage other than to refer to a group of my esteemed colleagues as a couch or complex of analysts. The term clutch has been proposed, but is clear evidence of resistance...
Remarkably enough, there have been few really satisfactory dictionaries of American slang. H. L. Mencken made his prodigious contribution (The American Language), and Lester Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark produced their useful but not fundamental compendium (The American Thesaurus of Slang). Standing up well against the competition, Dr. Harold Wentworth, editor of the American Dialect Dictionary, and Stuart Berg Flexner, Cornell and University of Louisville philologist, have produced a handy, invaluable reference work that may well emerge as the standard in the field. In short, the authors have done a remarkably fly and dicty...
...detect a certain confusion of idiom, a conflict in tone, almost a confounding of genres, in what you say." I threw a thesaurus at him, roguishly...