Word Spinners

Every article I write contains words that send me first to the dictionary for correct spelling and then to Roget's Thesaurus to verify the emotion or setting the word implies. Peter Mark Roget was a precocious boy who by the age of fourteen was studying medicine at Edinburgh University. He paid particular attention to the senses in his medical studies but his creative mind came up with many inventions. One being the basis of slide rules used in mathematics until the calculator was devised.
Roget was a prolific writer. He described an optical illusion he noticed while watching the wheels of a horse drawn carriage through the blinds of a window. The illusion - 'the Persistence of Vision' - allows us to see a succession of still images as a continuous, moving picture, and it is this that makes cinema and television work.
Beyond that were other inventions. But back to the thesaurus. As early as 1805 (around age six) he had compiled, for his own personal use, a small indexed list of words which he used to enhance his own writing. After retirement from his position as Secretary of the Royal Society (Britain's Academy of Science), he devoted his life to that project and published the first edition in 1852. A book of synonyms with 990 classes of words that allowed easy access to others of similar meanings. It has never since been out of print.
There are books that claim enormous printings, widespread purchases, but none has been so thoroughly appreciated and widely read and reread in the world of word spinners as Roget's Thesaurus. I bought the third edition in the 1970s and use it with the greatest fondness and treat the pages with tender care.
Thumb through the pages. You'll find the trail of meanings fascinating. Whether you write or not it can add unexpected dimensions to your vocabulary, more practical additions than Shakespeare or Lovecraft ever could.
Naomi Sherer