Yet what some will see as just another melancholy comment on the degraded state of contemporary language has for me turned out to be rather helpful.
Don't know a good synonym for philistine? Why not look it up in rogue? Even worse, if you happen to enter the same word in the thesaurus that comes with Microsoft Word (but which is made under contract by a firm with the name-somewhat less than encouraging for lexicographers-Soft-Art Inc.), you will be obligingly informed that what you must have been thinking of, when you were so slack as to write by mistake the name of literature's most celebrated helpmeet, was in fact the word rogue.
#Kaleidoscope synonym software
No, if you attempt to write the word Roget using any of Bill Gates's spectacular software, you get a squiggly red line underneath, indicating that you have written a word the software doesn't recognize. (It has to be said, however, that the name is not in Oxford's Dictionary of Eponyms.) But no readily available computer-program-integrated dictionary seems to agree with the OED: none I used lists the word, even though Microsoft Word (which not unreasonably sports its company name in its own dictionary) has a fair enough share of other eponymous and similar words and phrases that might be thought of as equally significant- boycott, thermos, Kodak, and bowler hat among them. The old-fashioned Oxford English Dictionary has a listing, naturally, and makes it clear that the word-as in, for example, to look it up in Roget-is now so well known as to have the status of an eponym.
The spell-checker that is provided on most computers these days has no listing whatsoever for Roget. On the same pair of pages onto which his life is squeezed are far-more-substantial articles about figures one must suppose are now more deserving of note: the Korean leader Roh Tae Woo the Belgian statesman Charles Rogier the Huguenot Duke of Rohan the author of a book called Australian Totemism, one Géza Róheim and a murdered Nazi storm trooper named Ernst Röhm.īut a more potent clue is to be found whenever one tries, using modern equipment, to write anything about Roget. One hint as to his possibly altered standing comes from the latest version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, although Roget was an editor of the seventh edition and a contributor of more than 300,000 words to it, gives him somewhat short shrift today, with an entry of a mere twenty lines. The writing world may at last be having second thoughts about Peter Mark Roget, Esquire-polymath, physician, cinema inventor, slide-rule maker, chess master, lexical scholar, and the man who gave us one of the best-known reference works in the English language.
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