Here’s a confession.  I am an absolutely addicted devotee of Roget’s Thesaurus.  I have been one since my fourth grade teacher had us write a piece called “A Surrendipitous Journey” using as many adjectives as possible.  To this day, I never write a sentence, be it in prose or poetry, without my trusty, well-used Thesaurus by my side.  This has always been a guilty pleasure, I must admit.  I always feared that I was somehow “cheating.”  But a wonderful friend who generally knows what she’s talking about made me feel much better about this a few years ago.  She told me that the genius isn’t in holding the entire lexicon of the English language in your head.  The genius comes in knowing which word to choose.  Love that.

And now, a leisurely flip through the Sunday Times Culture section, reveals a whole new style of thesaurus — at least one new to me.  Oxford University Press has just released “The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary,” two huge volumes, each “the size of a phone directory, at more than 2,000 pages, bound in handsome blue buckram and stamped in gold lettering.”  Yum!!  It seems to have taken Roget’s system of numerical ordering of words rather than alphabetical — which I just love.  I love realizing that most of the words I’m looking for fall into the 400’s.  But the one difference it does have from Roget’s is that its words are listed according to each word’s history, oldest words first.  And so you have laid out before you “13 centuries of the English language, since its earliest Anglo-Saxon days, rearranged in nearly 800,000 meanings and more than 236,000 categories.” As the article’s author, Christopher Hart, explains you can travel throughout history on the backs of changing expressions for any word you want.  Let’s take “f*ck,” for example.  Hart’s personal favourite word for this activity, and one which he (and I) believe should be revived, is the word “toggle” which dates back to 1225.  Hart gives it a go with “Hello darling, fancy a toggle?”  Works for me…..

But now for the bad news.  This amazing feat of research, this must-have for any lover of the English language, costs £250.  For now.  The price goes up to £275 after January 31, 2010.  I wonder if those two volumes of 2,000 pages will fit down the chimney……