Roget and Out

I love my Roget's Thesaurus. I love it so much that I have taken the trouble to scan it in so that you can see how well-thumbed and fondly-used it is.

It was given to me as a birthday present by my grandmother, whom I adored.

If I had to choose a desert island book, it would be right up there with the Collected Poems of WB Yeats. It's not just an indispensable tool for a writer, much better than that pinched and meagre facility which Windows provides, it is a work of poetry in its own right.

See what spells it can cast over a dull a word like grey:

greyness, canescence, neutral tint, pepper and salt, chiaroscuro, grisaille, oyster, gunmetal, ashes, neutral, sad, leaden, livid, grizzled, hoary, glaucous, steely, pearly, smoky, cinereous, field grey, iron grey, mousy, mole.

Cinereous! Canescence! It's pure magic. I often find  myself looking up one thing and travelling from that to another to another, in something that is more than a flight of fancy, it's an unfettered leap of the imagination. Using Roget gives my writing not just breadth, which is easy enough to achieve if you work at it, but depth as well, something which is much more elusive (or flown, or fugitive, or wanted, or slippery, or abient (?), or enigmatic, or abstruse...)