When I’m using a thesaurus, it generally is not because I want to find, as a synonym for “sad,” a word like “gloomy” or “unhappy.” It’s because I’m looking for something like “lugubrious.”
Show me a thesaurus that will give me synonyms like “mendicant,” “tarradiddle,” “recrudescence,” “bowdlerize,” or “sigil,” and I will be happy convivial.
Author Archives: Luke Rodgers
Why do all thesauri seem to suck?
February 25, 2010 – 10:43 am
Unabomber weighs in on ancient Egyptian dwarf-worship
February 24, 2010 – 12:55 am
Letter to the Editor, New York Review of Books, Vol. 52, No. 12, July 2005
In “Survival of the Smallest” {NYR, March 10], István Deák writes on page 22: “In ancient Egypt, dwarfs were often venerated like gods.” Deák here is discussing pathological dwarfs. However, Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, [...]
Goethe-recognition FAIL
February 21, 2010 – 6:11 pm
Goethe in same room as unaware Hölderlin; hilarity ensues
Logic of post-modern thought
February 19, 2010 – 12:57 pm
The role played by “sympathy” in the middle ages, as Foucault develops it in The Order of Things, is today played by “contagion” (though we don’t know it).
“Your opinion doesn’t have to be based on facts”
February 10, 2010 – 1:36 pm
According to a Teabagger
Progress without politics
November 2, 2009 – 2:09 am
Are we supposed to think this is a good thing, Bloomberg?