08.16.08
Sin-onymy
I’m confused. Perplexed. Flummoxed. Bemused. Discombobulated. Kerfluffled. Well, those aren’t quite the words I want. Let me turn to my thesaurus . . .
Stop!
PLEASE don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.
Thanks for saving me from myself. That’s from an article by Grant Barrett in the Malaysia Star. Barrett contends that a thesaurus leads you to selecting haughty or imprecise words, or flashy words you haven’t used before and have that new-car smell. These are all dangers, I agree. All tools have dangers. But using a razor doesn’t force you to shave off your eyebrows; using a thesaurus doesn’t force you to select the wrong word.
Barrett’s cautions aren’t (what’s the word I’m looking for? oh—here’s a good one) hidebound. And in fact he makes a superb point that individual words do not substitute for clear, precise writing. The right reasons to use a thesaurus are many:
- Discover nuance. The parenthetical above wasn’t me being a smartass. I indeed went to a thesaurus to find hidebound to communicate inflexibility. I liked the tight-skinned implications of the word I found in my search.
- Enrich your vocabulary. Perhaps you’ll find a word or two you’d not encountered before. Barrett dismisses the thesaurus in part because “no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries.” Granted. But a tome that included a definition for each word would be monstrous and unpublishable. So turn to the tool dedicated to that purpose. Look up new words in the dictionary. (And the smartass in me wants to ask why someone who finds thesauruses potentially harmful owns more than a dozen of them—wants to, but I’ll resist. Sort of.)
- Enrich your understanding of the range of the language. Perhaps you’ll encounter words you know, but hadn’t realized were related to the word you’re looking up. As a hypothetical, imagine someone looking up atrocity and discovering the expected abomination and the unexpected enormity. “That means ‘real big,’ doesn’t it?” our hypothetical writer might think. No, it doesn’t.
- Increase your humility. Sometimes the word you know is perfect is not perfect at all. Return to our hypothetical thesaurus consultation, and this time picture the writer looking up enormity to begin with.
- Become practiced with writing tools. Use a razor but once in a while, and you’re apt to cut yourself. Use it daily, and shaving becomes efficient; the results cleaner, more acceptable. The thesaurus, the dictionary, the rhyming dictionary, the grammar guide, the etymological dictionary—use all regularly (and not just one of each—a dozen or more sometimes suffices) to learn their strengths, deficiencies, goals and assistances, and you can use each tool like a fine razor to pare down to the most precise words and wordings—a hallmark goal of concise writing.
In fact, a danger far greater than using a thesaurus is not using it enough.
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JohnnyB said,
August 16, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Roget’s Thesaurus is one of those books that can not be replaced by an online version. The structure of it allows you to search for just the right shade of meaning you need. It’s a fabulous (is that the right word?) tool. Even the online ones can be useful in a pinch.
However, I can see that if one is just trying to avoid repeating a word and takes whatever alternate is listed for said word, it could lead to disasterous writing. But it is the writer who is the real disaster and the thesaurus is not to blame.