Issue No. 595
Culture
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18 - 24 July 2002 Issue No. 595 Culture |
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Plain Talk
No doubt most of us English-language scribblers, whether native speakers or not, have on occasion cast a glance at the famous Roget's Thesaurus. But I doubt that many of us have bothered to read the author's preface to the original 1852 edition, or indeed that of any subsequent edition of the book. It would never have occurred to me to do so myself if not for an article that appeared recently in one of the London papers -- I forget which -- marking the 150th anniversary of the publication.
I happen to own two editions of the book, both of which I consulted on the present occasion: one published in 1962, and the sixth impression of the 1982 edition (printed in 1985); comparing dates, I was impressed yet again by the number of editions and impressions of Roget's Thesaurus. "Roget's Thesaurus is well known to word lovers and word users," writes Susan M Lloyd in the preface to the latter edition, "as a collection of words and phrases arranged according to ideas rather than alphabetically -- a 'treasure house' of language as its name, taken from the Greek, implies".
It was interesting to relate her comment to the original introduction by Dr Roget himself, in which he describes a thesaurus as the opposite of a dictionary in that, while a dictionary gives the meaning of a given word, a thesaurus collects words expressing a given meaning. A most brilliant summing up of the concept that lies behind the volume.
Going through my two editions I could see that, even within such a limited span of time, the new edition had incorporated a huge number of expressions generated by 20 years of technological development and shifting usage. Words in the 1982 that are not present in the 1962 edition include, to mention but a few examples, Eurocrat, ombudsman, spokesperson, trouble- shooter and anachronism. In fact I ended up picking out hundreds of added words, a good portion of which turned out to be composed of Americanisms: junk food, minicab, high-speed and inter-city. "We live in a technological age," Lloyd writes in her preface, "and this accounts for a large proportion of the vocabulary which is new to the thesaurus. New paragraphs have been added to deal with data processing, microelectronics, space travel and sources of energy." The danger inherent in the inclusion of these words, she adds, "is to betray Roget's intention of catering primarily for the layman".
Ironically enough, Dr Peter Mark Roget -- the man who made such an enormous contribution to the study and practice of the language -- did not in fact have very much English blood in his veins. His father was a Swiss pastor who went to Britain, and his mother's grandfather was a French Huguenot who fled to London. Roget earned a degree in medicine, of all professions, practicing in Manchester for a while before settling down in London. He was ambitious and intelligent, and besides practicing medicine he spent a great deal of time pursuing his passion for the sciences, from zoology to optics. It must have been this passion to classify that informed his interest in words. And despite his medical and scientific achievements, it is for his leisure activity of compiling a thesaurus that Roget is best remembered. "He was uniquely qualified for the task. All his life," Lloyd tells us, "he had been concerned with order, with marshalling a mass of facts or observations into a meaningful form which both expressed their special qualities and reaffirmed their unity."
Publishing the book at age 71, he continued to improve and add to it until he died 20 years later. The production of the book took four years, and the project not only utilised Roget's talents, it fulfilled his need for reaffirming order and creating a realm of linguistic stability for centuries to come.
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