07.22.08

I’ll buy a vowel, Vanna . . . not that one . . . a shorter vowel

Posted in spelling, write tight, writing craft at 6:32 am by Bill Brohaugh

The Mr. Write Tight in me should like a recent website discovery more than he’s amused by it, but right now he’s weighing which side to fall on. You see, Thsrs.com am(us/az)es me.

Thsrs is likely not pronounced thissors (which is how you’d pronounce the word describing that dangerous pair if as a kid you ran with them and stabbed yourself in the tongue rather than poking your eye out). It’s pronounced, I presume, thesaurus, because in a clever but still somewhat shaky marriage of form and function, thsrs represents Thsrs.com, a site that bills itself as “The shorter thesaurus.” Type in a word, and you’re presented with a list of synonyms, all shorter than your source word. And shorter is good, right Mr. Write Tight?

To a point, but more on that in a moment.

I decided to play the meta-reference game at Thsrs.com. Meta-reference—referencing referencing—is the sort of thing you see in increasingly tired and repetitious quips: Why is the word abbreviation so long? Monosyllabic isn’t. What’s another word for thesaurus (other than thsrs, of course)? Meta-referring, I typed in sesquipedalian at our designated vowel-less site, half expecting that “sskwpdln” and fully expecting that “verbose” or “wordy” would be among the returned synonyms. What I got was:

polysyllabic
long
pretentious
sesquipedalia
polysyllable

Well, long is shorter (which sounds like an aphorism, doesn’t it?). And I like pretentious—which is only marginally shorter, yet has its special implication. Grandiloquent is but a letter shorter, but should be included, too. The lessons here are twofold: 1) A thesaurus is but a suggestion tool, and 2) the right word is the right word, and the right phrasing is the right phrasing. Shorter is an admirable goal only if shorter communicates as effectively or more effectively.

But back to meta-reference fun. Let’s look up thesaurus at Thsrs.com. But one word is returned: wordbook. Not returned is treasury, or any of the several “other words” for thesaurus, shorter or otherwise (and more on that in another post).

Now, in final meta-reference fun, let’s look up shorter, which returns this result:

Aha. “Shorter” doesn’t exist. And in some senses, it should not exist for writers, especially when it displaces “concise,” “precise,” “exact,” “evocative,” “communicative,” “meaningful,” “poetic,” “powerful” or plain-ol’ “perfect.”

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