- Don’t ever use a fucking famous-quotes book.
- Don’t ever use a fucking thesaurus.
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May 25th, 2004 at 10:42 pm
…unless you just wanna read your thesaurus like a book…
May 26th, 2004 at 3:43 pm
But even then, why not just bust out the OED? Or some nice Victorian novels? The thing that bugs me about thesauruses is their divorce from context. Words are best encountered alive, in their natural ecosystem.
Stop by an old-fashioned natural history museum, like the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and walk through their galleries of stuffed animals. Cage upon cage of forlorn and dusty birds, glassy eyes now dulled with painful longing for their native land.
A sunny morning, 1849. The high Peruvian plain. Harvard Joe, fresh from his trip to Lake Titicaca, watches the indigo sky with keen attention. At a seemly remove from him native porters, faces blank, cheeks bowed out with spirit-strengthening quids of coca, tend the specimen-laden llamas.
A bird wings into view.
The Bird: Doo dee doo.
Harvard Joe: Egad, another nondescript! Or rather, perhaps, ‘Eureka’, ha-ha! I daresay this will show Agassiz who’s whom!
The Gat: Buk Buk!
A broken spiral, down, down. A native, expressionless, rushes off, bag in hand, toward its terminus. Returning, without expression, he hands it over to Harvard Joe.
Harvard Joe: Ah, an Andean sparrow, but look at the articulation of that post-cervical doojigger. Capital! I shall call it Passer Josephi Harvardiensis. Well, on we go then! Vamos, hey?
May 30th, 2004 at 5:48 pm
Huzzah!
June 4th, 2004 at 11:29 am
ah, so good. so good! let us in two forenoons to the active laze of the velocipede.
June 4th, 2004 at 11:32 am
A merry scheme! I am for it.
August 10th, 2004 at 4:56 pm
Hear, hear!
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” — Herman Melville