The craziest thing about the English language is that there is no synonym for Thesaurus
, our main source of them. The vague and unsatisfactory “Word Book” and “Synonym Dictionary” are as close as it gets on
NATIONAL THESAURUS DAY!
Couldn’t British lexicographer Peter Roget have just made some up?
It was, after all, 1852, a date he should have known was so long ago that no one would notice and by now we’d have another word for thesaurus, with no one the wiser (shrewder, sharper, slyer, more sagacious…).
Roget managed to live to 90, plenty of time to regret his incredible faux pas (blunder, gaffe, indiscretion, impropriety, solecism, error…).
Peter Mark Roget may have created the perfect mirror image of mankind: a book with the answers to all our questions but the one that is most obvious (evident, apparent, manifest, patent, conspicuous, pronounced, transparent…).
•Suggested Activities: Expanding your vocabulary (language, lexicon, words; diction, terminology, phraseology, nomenclature, terms, expressions, parlance, idiom, jargon).