The Thinker's Thesaurus

On the forty-second page of “The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words” author Peter E. Meltzer wrote (hyperlinks & most emphasis added):

towards learning higher vocabulary, he quotes an educator who visited a classroom of 12-year-olds and observed them studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. "I learned that they spend hours each month... studying long lists of verbal analogies such as 'untruthful is to mendacious as circumspect is to caution.' The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills." McWhorter states that "the passage got around in the media, intended to make people shake their heads at such a sad sight," and that:

"[I]t is telling that it spontaneously struck [the educator] as being so sad, so beside the point of education, that twelve-year-olds were being taught the meaning of written words. ... [He] assumes that this learning of words is unrelated to the developing students' reading abilities. ... [H]is discomfort at seeing twelve-year-olds drilled on words like this marks him as a man of our times, for whom learned levels of English are less a main course than a garnish in an education [and that] learning high vocabulary [is] an imposition."

One suspects that those who would object to the use of words contained in this thesaurus also concur with the notion that teaching of analogies such as "untruthful is to mendacious as circumspect is to caution" is a waste of time. However, McWhorter notes that this is "hardly self-evident" and quotes an English professor from Rutgers who conducted a study that found "an extraordinary high correlation" between SAT verbal scores and final grades and a much lower correlation between grades and socio-economic status. In other words, mastering the types of verbal skills tested by the SAT is not an exercise in trivia or one which has no predictive values of furture performance in broader academic areas. The same may be said of the synonyms in this thesaurus: learning their use is not an exercise in trivia or becoming lexiphanic.

In a Utopian lexicographical world, the synonyms that appear in this thesaurus will be as familiar and accessible to everyone as the mundane synonyms which now appear in ordinary thesauruses. Perhaps this book is a small step in that direction. However even though none of us can be expected to know every word in the English language, or even

20. The word "insouciant" once again points out the flaw with Mr. Kilpatrick's argument. About that word, we may safely assume, first, that Mr. Kilpatrick nows what it means (and has likely used it himself from time to time), second, that he would never equate it with any of Mr. Buckley's word choices which Mr. Kilpatrick mocks, and third, that he would find ludicrous the notion that it should be jettisoned from the language. And yet, despite these assumptions, two things are true: First that the simpler words "nonchalant" or "carefree" could be substituted for "insouciant" just about every time. Second, and more importantly, there are many people who do not know the meaning of "insouciant." But, given our assumptions above, what can Mr. Kilpatrick say to those people? The only thing he could say is that literate people should know that word. Of course, that brings us right back to the problem of setting him up as the standard we would have to consult on every word. One wonders where, for example, would he stand on a less common synonym for "insouciant," such as "dégagé" which is used in this thesaurus? In any event, the point is clear. Of course, it is entirely possible that some words may appear in some dictionaries but not in others. However, this is almost always by virtue of the simple fact that some dictionaries are more comprehensive than others and thus will necessarily contain more words, particularly the kind of which appear in this thesaurus. For example, the number of entries of the typical college dictionary is exceeded by the number in the 4th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. This in turn is exceeded by Webster's Third International Dictionary, which in turn is exceeded by the Oxford English Dictionary.

More information about “The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Marion Street Press, September 2005. Paperback, 461 pages. ISBN: 0972993797; EAN: 9780972993791.)