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Thesaurus UnboundIf Roget's is becoming a relic, what lies ahead?

By Christine KenneallyPosted Monday, April 7, 2008, at 7:39 AM ET

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Previously, Christine Kenneally reviewed Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. Adam Kirsch asked whether dictionaries should be scientifically objective. Jesse Sheidlower explained how to get a word into the dictionary.

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Christine Kenneally is the author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. Her writings can be found on the blog www.christinekenneally.com.

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Notes from the Fray Editor

Pr1ss thought the article was 'cohegent', and we wasted quite a bit of time chasing that one up--it seems that Pr1ss is the main proponent of this neologism, but still, it seems a good combination of cohesive and coherent…

Comments from the Fray

Many many years ago I was a clerk in a bookshop on a busy downtown street. It was August, and the window dressers had set up a large display of reference books for a back-to-school promotion. One day a man came in and asked me for Roger's Treasure. I looked through the history and fiction section before I realized that he had seen Roget's Thesaurus in the window. He apparently thought it was a thrilling story of Captain Kidd and the pirates of the Spanish Main.

--instructor

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