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With his fresh and thoroughly researched account of today's papers Roget's life, Joshua Kendall sets out to do for his classic what Flame Out Simon Winchester did for the OED's dictionarians in The Professor and the Madman, while Noah Webster will get some today's papers attention later this year in Websterisms and Righting the Mother Almost Fired Tongue. (Already, Kendall is at work on a longer look at Noah Webster.)* today's papers World Historical Man Kendall reports that Roget married late but happily and lived today's papers until 90, yet he was born into a family that was shockingly Labor Pains afflicted by mental illness. His maternal grandmother, mother, and only sister suffered from major depressive episodes. Even video Roget's infancy was blighted by tragedy. His father contracted Wars: Lebanon tuberculosis six months after Roget was born. The child was sent to live with his grandfather and didn't see his parents again until war stories he was 2 years old. Roget's father died was when he was 4, and Bush's Double Talk on Iraq the death devastated Roget's mother, Catherine, and financially wrecked their small family. war stories Stonewall Petraeus After uprooting the household several times throughout Roget's childhood, Catherine eventually moved her family to Edinburgh, so her shy and studious teenage son could attend the university. There he was inspired by a number of marvelous scholars and Advanced Search teachers who challenged him to think about the imperfections of Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET language in the pursuit of knowledge. Though he began work on his thesaurus a few years later, Roget didn't attempt to publish his collection of synonyms until he was 73. It appears that he was finally provoked to action by the popularity at the time of books Piozzi's British Synonymy, which he thought greatly undeserved. Thesaurus Unbound Predictably, Kendall reaches for a therapeutic analysis: In the If Roget's is becoming a relic, what lies ahead? midst of this tumult, Roget made lists as a way of exercising By Christine Kenneally some control in his life. One of his first lists, at age 8, was of Monday, April 7, 2008, at 7:39 AM ET Latin words and their English translations. As an adult, he kept lists of important events, including "dates of deaths" of friends and relatives, and when he was working as a young doctor in When you are searching for a word that is more precise than Manchester, England, he began to organize a list of ideas and another though similar in meaning, you don't browse Piozzi's. related synonyms that would one day become the thesaurus. Yet British Synonymy, the first English book of synonyms, was There is surely something to this: No doubt Roget's manipulation written by Hester Lynch Piozzi. Nor do you grab your Girard's. of words gave him a feeling of mastery. Still, a relentless drive Published 76 years before Piozzi, the 1718 book of French to itemize and taxonomize isn't always a symptom. It's also the words appears to be the first collection of synonyms in any basic character of the scientific mind, which Roget clearly had. language. What you reach for is your Roget's. Originally In addition to his thesaurus, he achieved renown in his lifetime published in 1852, having been compiled over the course of for a two-volume work classifying plants and animals and for his more than four decades by the eponymous but strangely scientific observations about human optics. anonymous Peter Mark Roget, the thesaurus we know and love was not the first of its kind. Roget's was the sixth or seventh in a It was precisely that scientific bent that was his book's line of, well, synonymous—but not identical—compendiums. distinction. The organization of Piozzi's and Girard's, as well the Now, after a century-and-a-half career as a publishing handful of others that were published before Roget's 1852 thesaurus, was scattershot by comparison. Roget's, which was Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/115 remarkably successful in its author's lifetime, was a While computerized corpus research has grown since the '60s, comprehensive system of synonyms and antonyms. Roget built a every few years brings greater sophistication to the field. In numbered inventory of 1,000 fundamental ideas, like addition to widely used corpora like WordNet and the Bank of "existence," which appeared with a set of related words, ens, English, which contain millions of words, lexicographers can entity, being, existence. Later, he came up with a series of six drill further into language with specialized databases, like the nested classes, which were inspired by the Linnaean Enron corpus (the company's internal e-mails) or a corpus of classification of animals. Thus, Kendall writes, " 'Perfection' suicide notes. Oxford University Press relies on the Oxford falls under Class V, 'Words relating to the Voluntary Powers,' English Corpus, a 2-billion-word database begun in the year Division I, 'Individual Volition,' and Section i, 'Volition in 2000 to capture 21st-century English. The corpus is used to General.' " The higher the level, the more abstract the idea; the update products like the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus.A lower the level, the more specific. Roget considered his book the forthcoming edition will include nuanced distinctions between opposite of the dictionary: You started with the idea and then words like eccentric and quirky. A traditional thesaurus would found the word. His project was so original and so immense in simply list these words together, but eccentric is typically used scope that it has taken not just time but the connectivity, the of the very rich or reclusive whereas quirky is used less about huge databases, and the broad online access of modern people than about their style. information architecture even to begin to outstrip it. One of the most staggering advances in word reference is the Exactly where print reference will be in 10 years time is still forthcoming Historical Thesaurus of English, which will list all murky, but the writing is quite clearly on the wall or, if you the words of English—modern English words as well as long- prefer, the desktop. A recent survey to be published by the gone versions, such as the English spoken in the year 1000. The Dictionary Society of North America found that while students Historical Thesaurus will be a kind of companion to the famous use dictionaries as much as they ever did, the online versions 20-volume etymological Oxford English Dictionary.