Confess that you regularly consult a thesaurus, and you call your writing skills and even your intelligence into question, such is the ill repute into which this worthy reference has fallen. In a diatribe published in The Atlantic some years ago, Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman (about the making of The Oxford English Dictionary), lambasted Peter Mark Roget, the compiler of the granddaddy that spawned today’s myriad online and school-bag versions. Many writers I know scoff when asked whether they ever crack one. Of course, using a thesaurus—in its basic form, a book that groups words with similar or related meanings—can result in travesties against the language, and even common sense, when a novice plucks a word he doesn’t understand from an entry and substitutes it for thought. But to blame Roget for these crude mash-ups (the improvement of the phrase “his earthly fingers” into “his chthonic digits” is but one of Winchester’s amusing examples) is like blaming Henry Ford when a blind man takes a Taurus for a spin.

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