To the 21st-century student, the word “thesaurus” invariably conjures up memories of long, caffeine-fueled nights made just a little bit easier by a certain handy Microsoft Word application. But rarely does the modern student think of the lexicographic behemoth that is Roget’s Thesaurus in its original, printed form, let alone the vast, complex, and deeply eccentric personal history that lies beneath its pages.
This personal history is exactly what Joshua Kendall uncovers in The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus. Kendall reveals the quirky and turbulently dramatic life of a man bent on cleaning up the English language, of a physician by trade who tackled the tangled mass of language with his fiercely rational, scientific mind.
Kendall admitted that he had been brought up viewing the thesaurus as “a bit of a crutch.” Contrary to what any frequent user of the Microsoft Word thesaurus might be inclined to believe, however, the work is far from a coldly impersonal classification system. “What I am trying to show is the thesaurus’ autobiographical side,” Kendall said. “The thesaurus represents language refracted through Peter Mark Roget’s personal background.”
The book served as an outlet for Roget’s obsession for organization and classification, an outlet that helped him maintain his sanity. As Kendall noted, the thesaurus as a classification system “says more about the classifier than the classified.”
What the thesaurus shows, more than anything else, about Roget is his genuine commitment to an absolutely anal level of precision. As Kendall put it: “What Roget stands for above all is the precise use of language.” Every consultation of the thesaurus, whether in its various printed or electronic forms, channels the 19th-century polymath’s spirit of exactitude.
While Kendall expressed a sense of caution towards those who use the thesaurus as a shortcut, he praised “all the journalists who have used it just to say something a little more clearly.
Great novelists and poets have used it in the right spirit to add a sense of clarity to their work.”
One aspect of the Thesaurus’ classification system that Kendall particularly appreciates is the room it provides for “endless searching,” the power it has to “jog the mind and produce a deeper level of understanding.” The thesaurus is not just a tool; every glance through the work’s pages bears the promise of linguistic adventure. “As a writer, I love projects that make me learn and think about things differently. There were several times [in the course of my research of Roget’s work] when I was just like, ‘Oh my God.’”
Continuing his investigation of the personal side of the lexicographic canon, Joshua Kendall is now in the process of writing an autobiography of Noah Webster, father of the now-ubiquitous
Webster’s Dictionary—a work that, much like the Thesaurus, most of us have simply come to take for granted as a grimly faceless classification system.
But as Kendall shows in The Man Who Made Lists, beneath the pages of such works can lie the most fascinating and vivid of personal histories.
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