The banality police are coming for our reference books. They've already gotten to the internet thesauri--rendering it useless for journalist. How long until Bartleby goes down as well?
« A herd, not a pack | Main | Rally round the flag » Lock up your dictionaries18 Apr 2008 11:03 am Comments (15)
You mean I'm not the only one who still uses Bartleby? 
I have never read a piece by a journalist and had the thought "What this person needs is a thesaurus." I have, on the other hand, sometimes thought "What this person needs is to get rid of the thesaurus." Get yourself an actual dead tree thesaurus. If you aren't motivated enough to take it from the shelf, you are better off without it anyway.
Good journalists use thesauri, not for finding ten-cent words they've never heard before, but for finding synonyms for things that they have to mention umpteen times in the same paragraph. As such, our use is transparent. The problem with dead tree is that we're mobile; I can't exactly haul a pile of books around with me every time I write up a conference.
MM, aren't there downloadable "thesauri"?
Not to be snotty or anything but I have always thought that if you need a thesaurus to remind you of the existence of a word, you must not really know what it means, and should therefore refrain from using it. No two words are really synonyms. Ask Flaubert.
Not to be snotty, but this is spoken like someone who has never needed to reference the Federal Reserve seven times in one paragraph. If you produce upwards of 5,000 words a week, I virtually guarantee that you will at some point require recourse to a thesaurus.
wow MM, exactly what kind of synonyms do you get, for the FedRes, from a thesaurus?
I'm usually looking for synonyms for "head of the bank"
National uncommunicativeness...atleast for the few days before announcing a rate change.
I'm looking for synonyms for "pretentious snob."
Vodkapundit has a post about this
This is serious. I use thesaurus.com all the time, usually because I know that the word I have on the page isn't exactly right, and because I know that the right word is out there. I just need help in finding it. If thesaurus.com has been dumbed down, where do I now go?
This is serious. I use thesaurus.com all the time, usually because I know that the word I have on the page isn't exactly right, and because I know that the right word is out there. I just need help in finding it. If thesaurus.com has been dumbed down, where do I now go?
"head of the bank" ------------ I still cannot tell you how Word 2000 behaves: the POS never opened while I was writing this.
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Oh man, don't even joke about Bartleby.
Posted by Dan | April 18, 2008 11:26 AM