The thesaurus is a book made not only for utility, but for delight, and that’s surely part of why it’s fallen out of favor. Delight is an imprecise business, and it has its perils.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image: Iron age coins from Beverly – Portable Antiquities Scheme from London, England [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
I strongly recommend (because I think you would like it “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” an essay by Anne Fadiman in her book _Ex Libris._ Her entire family loved words.
Have you been reading “Ella Minnow Pea”? One of my favorites.
To be clear, I didn’t think it was at all a copy, it’s just that the overall themes are the same – the joy of words, the danger of restricting which ones to use.
Just ordered! Thanks for the rec.
Oh, good! Have fun reading it!
I was so thrilled to learn that he had a second book, “Ibid”, written entirely in footnotes – and so sad that it was so terrible. I didn’t even finish it, but I reread “Ella Minnow Pea” pretty regularly because I love it so much.
I have a dictionary but not a thesaurus.