Roget’s Thesaurus: A library of words

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.

“We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,” writes Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendell. “But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.”

Read it here.

A book of words

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Nick Cave handwritten dictionary — Nick Cave’s handwritten dictionary

In his latest newsletter, my friend Alan Jacobs notes that Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is now fully online, and points to his 2006 piece, “Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges: Dr. Johnson and his Dictionary,” in which he recounts much of Johnson’s struggle putting together his book of words. (I was particularly sympathetic to Johnson’s disgust at his own “idleness” while holding a firm conviction that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I do love a man who contains multitudes… especially multitudes who hate each other.)

At the very end of the piece, Alan writes about the magic of paper dictionaries (emphasis mine):

Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. On my way to “serendipity” I trip over “solleret,” and discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of armored knights have a name. But this sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word in an online dictionary. The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.

Fifteen years later, this is no less true: the magic of a paper dictionary is the magic of finding things you didn’t know you were looking for. It’s a magic that electronic texts, for all their usefulness and convenience, still haven’t touched.

The supposed “shortcomings” of paper are what, in fact, make it such a wonderful technology. Here’s Alan, again (with emphasis mine, again):

George Landow has written that “the linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment.” But it turns out that, when it comes to dictionaries anyway, it’s hypertext that narrows and impoverishes. The simple fact that I cannot pick up a dictionary and turn to the precise page I wish, or, even if I could do that, focus my eyes only on the one definition I was looking for — the very crudity, as it were, of the technology is what enriches me and opens my world to possibilities.

Get your paper dictionary today! You shan’t regret it.

Nouns and verbs

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

“When you’re writing a song, nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”
—Chuck Berry

The first exercise in Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song is called a “Word Ladder.” (Not Lewis Carroll’s word game.) It goes like this:

Make a list of ten verbs related to some profession. (He uses a physician, I used a construction worker.)
Write down ten nouns within your field of vision.
Connect the words that don’t usually go together.

Here’s how it worked when I tried it:

Nothing that great, but that’s not the point. The point is to loosen up and play with language to get your brain going. Tweedy writes:

“I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities…. I find it almost always works when I’m feeling a need to break out of my normal, well-worn paths of language.”

“Nouns and verbs” is also the really basic advice I give to people who are trying out blackout poetry for the first time.

For example, here’s one I started by just underlining nouns and verbs that popped out at me:

And that led to this:

And seeing that, I realized with a little Photoshop cheat (is it cheating if there ain’t no rules?) I could “fix” it to this:

Not my best work, but, again, not the point. Plus, it only took me 10-15 minutes. (By the way, exercise #2 in Tweedy’s book is called “Stealing Words From A Book.” Stealing has, of course, always worked for me!) Give it a try next time you’re stuck.

Nouns and verbs, y’all. They’ll take you right through.

Related reading: “A bag of words” & “We are verbs, not nouns”

A bag of words

Friday, June 21, 2019

In my favorite writing book, What It Is, Lynda Barry explains how to make a “Word Bag.” A word bag is basically just a bunch of words you like that you write down and stuff in a bag and pull out randomly when you need to begin a piece of writing and you’re not sure where to start. (Here’s Lynda, taking you through the exercise.)

This is pretty much how Ray Bradbury got started, too.

INTERVIEWER

In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?

BRADBURY

Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

Here’s more from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, about about how these “long lines of nouns,” these lists, helped him figure out who he was as a writer:

These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull… I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.

He encourages other writers that making “similar lists, dredged out of the lopsided of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.”

(I talk more about the magic of making lists in chapter one of Keep Going.)

I’m here now

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

I took a picture of this deteriorated sticker at the airport yesterday and thought of Bertha Truitt, the mysterious main character in Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway, who, whenever she’s asked where she’s come from, answers, “I’m here now.”