To provide apologies at the beginning of an essay is not standard, yet, the circular, elongated route I am taking may seem extreme. But imagine that the stray path, though requiring more time, also provides a dynamic, unexpected vista, making any detour seem worthwhile.
Imagine a world where smog and other pollutants filled the air and your lungs. Where dampness was a year round infliction; your living space like moist, cobbled cells. You were free but only in a state of mind. The labor you endured was tortuous. The sewers were the streets you walked along. This was a time when a medical man like Peter Roget had to create mental barriers for his own survival as he applied his trade amongst the less fortunate class. His belief in the good of all man was complicated by his own crippled mental, privileged state, expressed in what one would today call OCD – obsessive, compulsive disorder. But the early 19th century England would have viewed Peter as only odd, in service for the betterment of man.
Peter had a lively medical practice, but with a scientific mind, sought causes of some of the common maladies he saw living in a class state, where factory workers in the industrial areas were over flowing. This was the contrary of a typical medical man at the time, where practice alone brought in financial security. Not tinkering with ideas. As a practical approach, he worked with the public health causes, calling for improved personal hygiene, airier living quarters, to which to a larger populace, in sorts, perceived him as a righteous sort.
As stated, Peter was a man of science. Early 19th century allowed men of scientific training (or of a priestly background) to wander between disciplines of knowledge, from botany to zoology, to geology, to politics, to literature. He was a man of training and knowledge. A privileged place indeed. He was a strict follower of Linnaeus, the cataloguing of nature who created the binomial classification we still use today. Homo sapiens, italicized with capital at the genus Homo, and sapiens the species. “I classify, therefore, I am” he once wrote in his youthful period. This would seem a reasonable expression considering his OCD. Besides, the study of natural history, in its more scientific rather than theological genre, was just beginning. Always ready for a thought, one day he observed a horse drawn cart roll by his vertical slat-shaded basement window. The wheels' spokes seemed distorted through the blinds as the cart moved on. Curious, he ran out of his house, paid the driver a few coins to continue back and forth in front of his windows at different speeds. He was noting how the eye, specifically the retina sees still images as a continuous picture moving. He notified the scientific elite with a publication, “Explanation of an Optical Description in the Appearance of the Spokes in a Wheel as Seen through Vertical Apertures,” which immediately drew the attention of other scientists. What Peter described was the theoretical structure of what we would later call motion pictures. The movies.
What is thought as a life achievement in ones own time, history may have other plans. Peter’s major work in science was the contribution to a series of very popular books call the Bridgewater Treatise. These were to describe the works of God as seen through the natural world. Peter’s contribution, summed up in two volumes, was the physiology of animal and plants. It was a best seller in the 1830s where a hungry population were eager to learn, and explain the wonders of nature in light of reveled religion.
But history has an odd way of twisting the final outcomes of a life, for Peter was no singular man. His psychosis was strong, heavy on the anxiety from the time of a child. Some of his immediate relatives had deep psychological issues that were manifested in Peters own home environment. His relationship with his doting mother was abhorrent. To save himself, to finally have moments of sane control over his life, he secluded himself writing lists of words. Organizing and comparing them. We would call these a list of synonyms, words that have similar meaning. Throughout his life, in small packets of time, he would add to this growing list for practical, almost therapeutic purposes. “The process of verbal classification” he once wrote “is similar in principle to that which is employed in the various departments of Natural History.”
After a successful career in medicine, his retirement brought further anxiety. Idle hands were not his habit. With some nudging by his family, he dusted off his list of words, thousands in total, and began further organizing them, not just for personal distraction and play, but for actual publication. Published in 1852, Thesaurus of Words and Phrases by the author, Peter Roget first entered the populace. As one biographer noted, “Roget looked to words as an essential tool in the fight to advance human knowledge”.
The 21st century has come to know Peter not for his dedication to medicine or science, or even the instigator of the movies. But for his thesaurus. Though still in in print, with numerous editions, history has not been so kind to Roget. Some critics today find the thesaurus, and all its versions and types as cheats to the English language. “It brings words to the mouths … where words were not earned by a breadth of reading.” Further, the substituted words provide “no context, [a] standard requirement of intellect.” As an earlier critic wrote, the thesaurus “accelerates the tongue without accelerating the faculties.”
Still, the thesaurus persevered, but only for one reason. It's usage was ‘accelerated’ thanks in part to New York World newspaper in 1913 with a game called “Fun”. Fun was the precursor to the crossword puzzle. And here, the thesaurus became almost essential as the game spread across North America, and elsewhere.
Critics of the Peter Roget’s thesaurus in the 1850s were already ringing the alarm bells, however. An American essayist, Edwin Whipple believed that this book of synonyms “was certain to spread contagion of literary mediocrity” by shortening the act of naturally acquiring language and words. Securing the “results without imposing the task of labor.” Whipple saw the cheat right away.
And here comes the end. In an austere, progressive, humane world today, with all the possibilities of learning and acquiring knowledge through digital means, or at least the allusions we have about how great we are with our digital media, what would Whipple think of the internet? Despite infecting all of the current generation and most of us in the earlier segment of life, with EVERY need, want, and desire, the internet as an educational tool has a failing grade. At least according to the numerous surveys and studies. It provides access to almost everything….and almost no one is using it in this fashion. It provides texts and studies, yet most users go for the crib notes. It provides an avenue for short cuts, without the act of reading the sources themselves [the cut and paste generation as I call it]. And as many studies have shown, hasn’t helped our children learn [comparative assessment of grades and reading skills of today compared to 20, 30 years ago have remained the same, if not fallen].
If this sounds like an old curmudgeon blowing his horn about days gone by, listen to the more youthful J. J. Abrams, film producer of TV shows like LOST, and the latest STAR TREK movie. “Earning the end game”, the short cuts, whether computer games, or in life, “seems so yesterday, especially when we can know whatever we need to know whenever we need to know it” [emphasis mine]. Peter Roget’s thesaurus was meant to provide structure to the English language. Its usage was then twisted for the easy way out, of amplifying ones knowledge and intellect when there was less so. In parallel the digital age of options, “aps”, and solitary social media is to me, somewhat striking.
TTT
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