Mar

12

Order Out of Chaos.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 12, 2008 |

A new biography of Peter Mark Roget, The Man Who Made Lists by Joshua Kendall, is an exploration of Roget’s compiling lists and classification of things as a way of keeping insanity at bay. Having suffered the death of his father when he was six months old and the death of his doting grandfather when he was four, Kendall asserts that, for Roget, “Immersion in the nuances of language could invariably both energize him and keep his persistent anxiety at bay.” Reviewer Jonathan Yardley sounds a little skeptical, but admits that it’s plausible. Yardley also adds that “some critics were quick to point out, accurately, that a book such as this encourages laziness and glibness rather than diligence and precision.” I’m not sure this is entirely fair. No one could walk around with every word in the English language in their head, and I’ve used Roget’s Thesaurus frequently to find a word that’s close to the one I have in mind but is more precise. Or sometimes I’ve found a word that’s less precise, giving whatever I want to say a more nuanced feel, texture, tone, note, sense, or quality. Or if I want to avoid using the same word twice again.

Is there something about being crazy–or at least on the edge of it–that brings out the lexicographer in people, though? After all, this isn’t the first book about insanity and a famous reference work. In The Professor And The Madman Simon Winchester writes about how more than ten-thousand quotes for The Oxford English Dictionary were submitted by Dr. W. C. Minor, an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane who’d been imprisoned for murdering a stranger in London. Minor and the dictionary’s lead compiler, Professor James Murray, corresponded over twenty years, with Minor making a major contribution to the most complete English dictionary ever produced.

As far as I know Webster’s dictionary didn’t have such a colorful past, although Mark Twain, finding that Webster’s definitions frequently contradicted his, once said, “Mr. Webster; and he is dead, too, besides. It would be a noble good thing if his dictionary was, too.”


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Angel on March 12, 2008 8:18 am

    Excellent work, Chris. I think there must be something to the madness/language connection.

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