Most of us who have ever needed a good word have turned to an alphabetical thesaurus and quickly found a list of possibilities more impressive, more tantalizing or simply more accurate than the one our feeble vocabulary had mustered. Then we wrote the sentence or filled in the crossword and our search was over, done, finished, concluded, terminated.
Efficient? Yes. But not much fun, according to Robert L. Chapman, a lexicographer and editor who spent three decades in the word business.
Chapman, who was 81 when he died Jan. 27 in Morristown, N.J., after a long illness, once described himself as a "faithful and somewhat saucy servant of genius." He was referring to Peter Mark Roget, who wrote the first Roget's International Thesaurus in 1852 and whose work Chapman revised more than a century later.
Roget is famous for organizing the verbal universe by concept, listing thousands of words under headings such as Space, Matter and Intellect. Not intended as a mere synonym finder, Roget's thesaurus was structured in a way meant to stimulate thought and chains of association that may not have occurred to the user.
Using Roget's thesaurus requires two steps: First you flip to the voluminous index to find a word, then thumb to the referenced page. A search for an alternative to "nice," for instance, would lead to the category "Kindness, Benevolence," where the lengthy list of choices ranges from "goodness" and "benignity" to "Christlike," "Robin Hood," "Lady Bountiful," even "flower power."
But Roget, and Chapman, would not have wished you to stop there. Maybe you would turn to the next, even longer category, called "Unkindness, Malevolence." Perhaps there it occurs to you that the idea you had in mind is better expressed in the negative, as in "malignant," "ornery" and "cussed" or "corrosive," "sadistic" and "invidious."
Had you simply looked up "nice" in an A-Z word-finder, you might not have made the journey to "devilish." That's the kind of discovery that would have delighted Chapman.
Alphabetical thesauri are so "jejune," Chapman once told the New York Times. "You take one of those [alphabetical] books and you take the head word and six or seven synonyms and that's all you get. Whereas I would give you four or five times as many with many more nuances and possibilities.
"It's like the difference," he said, "between roast beef and Spam."
Chapman took the roast beef and adapted it to modern tastes.
