Sylvia Plath loved her thesaurus so much that she called herself "Roget's strumpet." She consulted it all the time while working on her first collection, The Colossus, and it shows. Plath later said she couldn't bear to reread those poems. Dylan Thomas was another thesaurus thumber, and in his work, too, the words it supplied were not always improvements.
As reference books go, the thesaurus has had a somewhat checkered history, in fact, and has probably occasioned as much bad writing as good. But its oddest feature is mostly invisible now that synonym finders have become virtually embedded in our computers. There's little trace anymore of Peter Mark Roget's original classification scheme, which divided up all of language into categories and subcategories.
Roget (1779-1869) was an obsessive list maker and classifier, and in this new biography, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness and the Creation of 'Roget's Thesaurus,' Joshua Kendall suggests - with something like obsessive frequency - that the habit was a kind of bulwark shoring him up against depression and mental instability.
Madness ran in the family, at least on his mother's side. Catherine Roget was a Romilly, from a family of French Huguenots who had settled in London, and her mother was a lifelong depressive, possibly a schizophrenic. Her brother, Samuel Romilly, a famous legal reformer, slashed his own throat after his wife died; and after the death of her husband (when Peter Roget was 4) Catherine became needy, neurotic and eventually psychotic. Peter Roget's sister and daughter also suffered from depression and breakdowns.
At an early age, Roget began making lists - of deaths, of events, of interesting words - and as he grew older, he also classified his experience according to an odd binary scheme, so that people, for example, were either "ordinary" or "peculiar," and landscapes were "beautiful" or "not beautiful." He counted all the steps he took during the day, had a fetish about cleanliness and was socially inept, failing to pick up obvious emotional clues.
At the very least, he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, but some of his behavior also suggest that, were his condition diagnosed today, he might be classified as someone with high-functioning Asperger's syndrome. It seems likely, in other words, that his passion for lists - for order and for categories - was not so much a heroic defense mechanism, as Kendall argues, but simply an involuntary part of who he was.
Whatever else he was, Roget was immensely accomplished, even for an age when polymaths were far more common than they are now. He trained as a doctor, and though his poor social skills kept him from being much of a clinician, he was greatly in demand as a lecturer in anatomy and physiology. He invented the log-log scale for the slide rule, wrote an influential book on natural history and contributed numerous articles to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He was also one of the first to observe that the retina sees a series of still images as a continuous picture - a discovery that led to the invention of the zoetrope, and eventually to motion pictures.
The thesaurus - or to give it its full title, Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition - was almost an afterthought. Roget began it when he was 26, then put it aside until he had retired from science and was eager to get his name before the public again.
If Kendall's writing has a fault, it's a tendency toward mind reading and novelization. But this is an almost forgivable lapse, because Roget is a hard subject to warm to. He led an extremely interesting life without being very interesting himself. He was aloof, humorless and self-absorbed, and so tamped down that he seems to have been incapable of strong feeling.
Another figure who comes inevitably to mind is Samuel Johnson, also an obsessive-compulsive and a collector of words. But Johnson had a largeness of spirit lacking in Roget, and words mattered to him not just as specimens but because of their emotional freight and what they could be made to say. From Kendall's book you get the sense that, for Roget, one word was pretty much the same as another.
When the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces 50 years ago this week, it prompted a mass exodus of some 2 million people — hundreds of thousands fleeing perilously on small boats across open water to escape the communist regime. Many ultimately settled in Southern California’s Orange County in an area now known as “Little Saigon,” not far from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where the first refugees were airlifted upon reaching the US. The diaspora now also has significant populations in Virginia, Texas and Washington state, as well as in countries including France and Australia.
On April 17, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) launched a bold campaign to revive and revitalize the KMT base by calling for an impromptu rally at the Taipei prosecutor’s offices to protest recent arrests of KMT recall campaigners over allegations of forgery and fraud involving signatures of dead voters. The protest had no time to apply for permits and was illegal, but that played into the sense of opposition grievance at alleged weaponization of the judiciary by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to “annihilate” the opposition parties. Blamed for faltering recall campaigns and faced with a KMT chair
Article 2 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China (中華民國憲法增修條文) stipulates that upon a vote of no confidence in the premier, the president can dissolve the legislature within 10 days. If the legislature is dissolved, a new legislative election must be held within 60 days, and the legislators’ terms will then be reckoned from that election. Two weeks ago Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed that the legislature hold a vote of no confidence in the premier and dare the president to dissolve the legislature. The legislature is currently controlled
Dull functional structures dominate Taiwan’s cityscapes. But that’s slowly changing, thanks to talented architects and patrons with deep pockets. Since the start of the 21st century, the country has gained several alluring landmark buildings, including the two described below. NUNG CHAN MONASTERY Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山, DDM) is one of Taiwan’s most prominent religious organizations. Under the leadership of Buddhist Master Sheng Yen (聖嚴), who died in 2009, it developed into an international Buddhist foundation active in the spiritual, cultural and educational spheres. Since 2005, DDM’s principal base has been its sprawling hillside complex in New Taipei City’s Jinshan District (金山). But
RSS