Corybanter (Original)

This is the original home of Corybanter, the first real blog I ever started. There are all kinds of old posts here, many of which were transferred over from my blog which used to exist on Posterous, a blog site that no longer exists. I don't currently post any new material here.

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Corybanter has a new home!

Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash

The current home of the Corybanter blog is:

corybanter.com

I don't intend to post any new material on this original Corybanter blog, so please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Thanks for reading!

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Love the song, and loved seeing this little glimpse into the making of the video!

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Adventures with The Book of Mormon by The Corybantic Podcast • A podcast on Anchor

Wherein I discuss some of my history with one of the more important American religious publications of the past two centuries, The Book of M

My most recent podcast ep, wherein I talk about my history with The Book of Mormon.

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The REVAMPED Corybantic Podcast!

A few weeks ago, I stumbled over a tweet about a former Baptist pastor who had converted to Mormonism. As someone who is interested in Latter-day Saint history and literature, including the Book of Mormon, I watched his video and discovered his podcast, The Narrow Gate. While I found his podcast very enjoyable, I was even more interested in how good it looked. It was on a site called Anchor.fm, and browsing through the site, I thought it looked much more user-friendly than the site I had been using to host my own Corybantic Podcast.

You see, back at the beginning of the pandemic (was it really only a year ago?), I decided to get back into podcasting. For a few weeks, it was going well: I bought a new microphone that I thought would sound better, and I was recording new episodes roughly once a week. But it was a LOT of work! I would record an episode, and then I would have to edit in some music, convert the whole thing to mp3 format, and upload it to the hosting website. The whole thing was not easy to sustain, and once again, my podcasting efforts came to naught.

Today, I did a little more research on migrating an existing podcast to Anchor.fm, and sure enough, after a little messing around with the RSS feed and such, I successfully migrated the old podcast to the new platform! So the NEW (or the NEW new) Corybantic Podcast is successfully up and running! You can listen HERE to my newest episode. The first new episode basically covers what I've described above, and in future episodes I plan to talk about some of my many interests, among them: The Bible, theology, language, dictionaries, Sherlock Holmes, The Book of Mormon, Shakespeare, and more. Also, I hope to eventually coordinate my podcasting with my blogging in a more logical, sensible manner. We shall see...

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Trying out an alternative to Facebook

For awhile now, I haven't really been all that pleased with Facebook. Sure, I post on Facebook all the time, but I find that much of the content on Facebook is awful. And I'm not too sure about how the company is run. So I've been looking for alternatives.

I tried MeWe.com, a few different times. But I didn't care for the interface, and everyone seems way too conservative for my taste. I'm a moderate kind of guy, so I'm not all that comfortable with super liberal types or super conservative types.

Today, I stumbled on a mention of another Facebook alternative: Heroes.app. The person who mentioned it said that it was a lot like Facebook in its design, so I figured I would check it out. The interface is a lot like Facebook, and I like it a lot better than MeWe. It looks like almost everyone there is pretty conservative, so I don't know how long I'll last there.

We'll see how the experiment goes.

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Closing in on a year of Covid

It's hard to believe that, in just a few weeks, we will reach the anniversary of the very first shutdowns due to coronavirus, aka Covid-19. So many things have changed. For one, I can barely remember what it was like to leave the house without making sure I had a mask with me. My kids haven't been to in-person school since everything first shut down. The list goes on.

I remember thinking early on, "Maybe this will only be a few months. When warm weather gets here, maybe things will get better." And here we are, almost a YEAR later. The church I serve as Director of Music Ministries has had in-person services since May of 2020, but those generally have between 30 and 40 people in attendance. We used to average somewhere around 200 on a Sunday. We also offer an online pre-recorded service, and frankly, I'm getting sick of it. Having to get 2 or 3 people together to record music for the following Sunday is not how I've done things for most of my church music career. I miss my choir.

My wife and I have commented many times on how weird it is to see movies or TV shows where people are together in big, tightly-packed crowds. I find myself thinking, "What about social distancing? Are those people washing their hands after touching each other?" It's bizarre.

I'm looking forward to the day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, where I don't have to worry about so many of the things that are daily worries for me now. How many people will be at the grocery store? Why isn't that person wearing a mask, don't they know we're in the middle of a pandemic? I've gotten less obsessive about following the graphs on the New York Times website, something I used to do every day.

Like most people, I think, I'm just looking forward to a time that I can call "normal." And by "normal," I'm hoping I'll mean something like "the way things used to be." Honestly, I don't know if that time will happen soon. But I pray it will. I, like most folks I know, am just tired of the whole thing.

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Designed to Deceive: Do These People Look Real to You?

The people in this story may look familiar, like ones you’ve seen on Facebook or Twitter or Tinder. But they don’t exist. They were born from the mind of a computer, and the technology behind them is improving at a startling pace.

Just sliding through the morphing faces in this article could keep me fascinated for a long time. The article itself is even more fascinating.

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Trump and the Christians: Evangelical historian John Fea on decoding the great paradox

Historian and author of "Believe Me" on his struggle to reach the embattled evangelicals who oppose Trump

I’ve heard John Fea talking about this topic on The Holy Post podcast, and I think he’s very articulate. Well worth reading...

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A learning experience on Twitter

I remember, back when I first opened a Twitter account, I didn’t see the point. 140 characters? What am I supposed to do with that? Well, of course, since that time Twitter has expanded out to 280 characters, and added the ability to share pics, GIFs, links, etc. And over the past 2 or 3 years, I’ve actually begun to use Twitter a lot more than I used to do. Twitter enables me to get quick reactions to what’s going on in the world, and often leads me to look things up in a more complete way somewhere else: news sites, Wikipedia, etc. Meanwhile, very few people I know in real life (e.g. church) follow me on Twitter, so I can be a bit more honest on Twitter than, say, Facebook, where I might inadvertently offend someone who actually knows me.

The thing is, though, most of my activity on Twitter goes relatively unnoticed. Occasionally I’ll get up to a dozen Likes on something I tweeted, or a comment I’ve made on a story. It’s fun to get a response or retweet from a celebrity. But usually my number of Likes is between zero and a dozen. I get the feeling that very few people on Twitter are paying attention to anything I might say...which leads me to the unusual thing that happened today.

This morning, I was reading on my Twitter feed some of the reactions to Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night. Now, to be clear, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another about Melania. But I saw an awful lot of tweets that complained about her Slovenian accent, and talking about how AWFUL her English is after all these year in America. I find that to be a xenophobic response to the First Lady’s speech. And so I tweeted the following:

Almost immediately, I started seeing Likes and Retweets of the post. And then comments, many of them not so complimentary. As I write this, the number of Likes is well above 400. I’ve never had a tweet blow up like this one did. And all I was doing was saying, “Hey, folks, maybe xenophobic comments are wrong, regardless of whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.” I thought it was a pretty mild position to take on the subject. Apparently not.

I had one guy take issue with the fact that he didn’t notice any tweets in my feed demanding justice for black people murdered by law enforcement (e.g. Breonna Taylor or Elijah McClain). So, let me get this straight: if I don’t tweet about the “right things,” then my humble opinion is irrelevant? I’m supposed to be passionate about the same things this guy is passionate about? Frankly, I rarely tweet about politics: I’m much more likely to share a song I like, or tweet about a Bible translation I’ve been studying. But this dude wouldn’t let go: he wanted to know why I was “obsessed” with Melania (whom he referred to as a “slut”). 

Other comments were the expected “what about-ism” things: Trump is horrible, why hasn’t Melania learned English after living here so long, Republicans criticize immigrants all the time, and so forth. But my point remains valid, I believe. If you want to criticize the content of the First Lady’s speech, go nuts. But why focus on her heavy accent? I’m pretty sure if I lived in a foreign country, even for several years, my American accent would shine through. (And I’m fairly decent at picking up accents, and pronouncing foreign words correctly.) To focus on Melania’s accent, and not the content of what she said, strikes me as xenophobic.  

I don’t expect I’ll start making more political comments in the near future. Today’s reactions were unpleasant enough. I like to share opinions online from time to time, but I’m never looking for an argument; I honestly don’t find such bickering pleasant. I should also mention that many people (mainly conservatives) thanked me for sharing my opinion in a thoughtful manner. I’m actually a bit disappointed that so many people of a liberal bent seem to have misunderstood my point so horribly. I’m a fairly moderate person, politically and socially, but I usually lean a bit left. To get such a drastic response from people who are further left than myself was not very fun. Lesson learned, I guess.

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The “Pure Word” Bible...Bible translation at its worst

In my Bible collection, which is currently about 300 volumes, I have all kinds of good translations, and I have a few that are...not so good. But this morning, I stumbled on a Bible translation that was published in 2017, that I think may perhaps take the cake for all-around bad translation philosophy. The translation is entitled The Pure Word, and its official website is thepureword.com. Now, to be sure, it’s difficult to judge the actual content of the translation, because on the website they only provide ONE verse for comparison: the ever-popular John 3:16. But that one is a good place to start, because it’s truly horrendous.

"Because, God has Loved in such a manner the satan's world, so that He Gave His Son, the Only Begotten Risen Christ, in order that whoever is Continuously by his choice Committing for the Result and Purpose of Him, should not perish, but definitely should, by his choice, be Continuously Having Eternal Life."

Where to begin? First of all, the site claims that The Pure Word reading “provides more original depth regarding the meaning of ‘believeth’ in Greek that was condensed by the scholars who translated the 1611 King James.” Uh huh. Well, the word “satan” is not in the Greek text, and the phrase “Only Begotten Risen Christ” does not appear anywhere in the Greek text, either. Translating “believes” as “Committing for the Result and Purpose of Him” is extremely interpretive.

The website also makes this claim: 

There are over 450 English New Testament translations; all riddled with inaccuracies that never reference the original Koine Greek definitions and each word's original parsings.

If they are claiming that no previous translators ever referenced the original Greek, that claim is demonstrably false. Meanwhile, the website claims that The Pure Word has been translated using “breakthroughs in monadic-based hermeneutics.” I can’t find any reference to “monadic-based hermeneutics” outside of The Pure Word’s marketing materials.

Things get worse, though. Searching Twitter for The Pure Word, I found this video interview with Brent Miller, the man who published the translation, and seems to be more or less solely responsible for the project.

This video has so many problems, I will only mention a couple. First, at about the 5:45 mark, Mr. Miller mentions that the King James translators sorted through 5,000 documents in order to come up with the Majority Text. This is a tremendously distorted description of the textual history of the Greek New Testament and the King James Bible. (The King James translators used printed texts, based on about a dozen different Greek manuscripts. The Majority Text was established much later in history.) Later, at the 14:40 mark, as he discusses The Pure Word rendition of John 3:16, which I’ve quoted earlier, he makes this statement: "...this is word-for-word, words aren't added, words aren't subtracted." As I’ve already mentioned, that simply isn’t true: all kinds of words are added.

As far as I can tell, The Pure Word could easily qualify as the worst Bible translation I’ve ever encountered. It’s difficult to tell for sure, as only the John 3:16 example is provided on their website. And I’m not willing to spend $35 on a New Testament of such low quality. It is simply mind boggling to me that someone who seems to have absolutely no academic qualifications, and little or no understanding of Bible translation, could publish something that directly criticizes the entire history of English Bible translation, making such extravagant claims for its own precision and accuracy. (It also has a very high rating on Amazon, four and a half stars, which leads me to believe that he solicited reviews from people who were friends or fellow church members.) This is Bible translation run amok, bad Bible translation philosophy and methodology at its absolute worst.

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Religious arguments on Facebook

This morning, I got involved in what I initially thought was a pretty minor debate on Facebook. A friend from high school was questioning all of the recent attempts to curb voting by mail. One of my other colleagues from high school commented that people should vote in person, and added that belief in GOD (her caps) was the only thing that was going to make the country better. Well, that was what spurred me to comment. I replied that I, too, am a believer in GOD (my caps), and I didn’t see what that had to do with the issue at hand. That was yesterday.

This morning the believer in GOD contacted me via Facebook Messenger. She repeated her assertion that, if people can wait in line at Walmart, they can wait in line to vote. (She also said that she didn’t want to comment on the original post again, for fear of being “attacked.”) She then wanted to know if I was voting Democrat. When I replied that I will definitely vote Democrat, she said, “That explains your answer then.” Well, that was annoying enough: the typical Republican/Democrat dividing line had been drawn. But it got worse. This was the next message:

You are a democrat and don't read about it.  The usps can't even deliver mail on time now.  You are blind to what is going on.  I don't see how a democrat can believe in GOD, unless you only believe certain things of GOD.  How can you support abortion and believe in GOD? Democrats support that.

This kind of thing REALLY bugs me: “You are blind” is a ridiculous assertion. It immediately shuts down the argument, because it assumes that anything I write, no matter how well intentioned it may be, is invalid due to my “blindness.” Still, I maintained that I was equally baffled as to how a Christian could support Trump. Then the argument got even nastier...

The devil has blinded you.  If you would pray for wisdom and discernment you would see why he is the president.

I will admit, this made me see red. What is it about some Christians that makes them believe that their opinions are from God, while those who disagree with them get their opinions from Satan? How is it possible to have a discussion if your belief is that your “opponent” is not merely misinformed, but actually being influenced by the devil himself?

She wrapped up the “discussion” with a backhanded blessing:

Have a great day Cory.  Peace be with you.

At this point, I was unable to wrap up without some degree of snark. I replied in this fashion:

I pray peace to you as well. However, if the devil is blinding me, then I hope God accepts my prayer.

Yeah, I know, not exactly sincere. (I’m not sure whether I will pray peace for her or not. I’ll do my best.) At that point, I decided there was no point in pretending this person was actually a “friend,” so I blocked her. The whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t actually enjoy religious arguments. I’d rather share my position and hear someone else’s position with the clear understanding that we both have the same rights to our own opinion. Being shut down by the “you’ve been blinded by the devil” argument is unpleasant. 

I am beginning to think that, here in America, we are quickly losing the ability to disagree with others without things getting ugly. And I admit, the argument I had this morning with someone I barely knew in high school may have gone differently if we were speaking to one another in person. The protection of being miles apart and typing our argument on a keyboard does not encourage a civil exchange of ideas. I accept blame in this situation: if I had been confronted with this person’s ideas live and in-person, I may have tried to be more amicable. As it was, I admit that I let my temper get the best of me.

I still will most likely not unblock my classmate, as I believe the argument would just continue, and it would likely be more unpleasant as it continued. Still, it’s not a great way to start my day. May God grant me more patience in the future.

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Virtual learning in the new school year

Tomorrow my kids begin their 2020-21 school year, and for the month of August, at least, all the learning will be on a virtual platform. Besides being just a bit nervous as to how well our family can make this work, I am of two minds about the situation: first, I am thankful that our school district has not decided to throw the kids back into an in-person environment; on the other hand, the short experience of virtual learning they got at the end of the last school year wasn’t incredibly encouraging. They both miss the contact they used to have with their fellow students and with their teachers. Of course, they will be able to see many of those same people on their computer screens when school resumes tomorrow, but it’s not quite the same, is it?

It just occurred to me, what would we have done when I was their age, if something like this pandemic had happened? In the early 80s we didn’t have the Internet. Assuming there would have been a similar attempt to minimize contact, I imagine school would have been done by handwriting assignments and then mailing them to the school. So, in a sense, my children are fortunate that technology exists that makes virtual learning possible, if not ideal.

I imagine we will approach this new situation in much the same way we approached the coronavirus shutdown in the first place. We will try to extend grace, not only to our children, but also to the teachers who are working so hard to provide a valid educational experience to their students.

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Back to blogging (again)

When coronavirus “lockdown” first began, I was so motivated to resume my blogging activity: I reworked my blog here at Tumblr, tried to tidy up some of my other blogs, even began a podcast. And then a sort of fatigue set in, I guess. I just realized that my last blog post was in early June, and August begins tomorrow. Where did all that time go?

For a long time now, I’ve wished I could be more consistent in my blogging. Lord knows, I feel as if I have plenty of opinions, plenty of different interests, plenty to share. And yet, over the years, I’ve never quite achieved the kind of daily (or even weekly) consistency that I would need to be a regular blogger. The kind of discipline needed to regularly write on whatever topics present themselves is something that has eluded me. I get inspired from time to time to write on whatever interests me, and I do it for a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months, and then...time passes.

So, once again, I’m making a pledge to myself to try to blog regularly. I will have to figure out exactly what that looks like: can I do it ever day? once or twice a week? Meanwhile, should I write about what interests me on any given day, whatever that may be, or do I need to focus my attention on one topic? In the past, I’ve blogged about a few main topics: Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, the Bible, the English language. Sometimes I think maybe I should simply choose one of those topics, and commit to writing about that one thing. But my interests are diverse, and I don’t know if that will work for me. 

It’s very possible that I won’t figure it out in August 2020. It could take me until 2021 to really figure out how to make my blogging work. But it’s something I want to do. It’s something I enjoy, but I need to figure out if I can make the results into something others can enjoy, too. If not, then it’s not really “blogging,” but rather a public journal. And maybe that’s okay, too.

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I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere: Inspector Watson? An Alternate History Twist

An alternative world of Holmes and Watson that has some fascinating intersections with our own.

My most recent article for I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, a piece about an alternate universe version of Watson, created by fans of a constructed language. Hope you enjoy it!

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Upside down Bible? Nope.

As a Bible collector who owns almost 300 different volumes of the Bible, I can’t be silent any longer. Let me start by making it clear that I found Mr. Trump’s recent PR stunt of posing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, after having tear gassed American citizens, to be disturbing and offensive in the extreme. So please don’t read this as a defense of Trump in any way. But, as I’ve read various reports and tweets on the story, an unusual detail has cropped up again and again: allegedly, Trump not only held the Bible aloft, like some sort of sign, but he also held it upside down. I’m not sure where this claim got started, but I have viewed the unedited video of the stunt numerous times, and I am almost 100% sure that he was holding the Bible right side up.

Granted it’s difficult to get a look at the spine of the edition he’s holding, and it’s one that has no print on the cover. And the glimpses offered in the propaganda video released by the White House are extremely brief. But I paused the video at about the clearest point I could find, and here is a screenshot of the moment right before he holds the book aloft.

It’s difficult to read the print on the spine, but the way it’s laid out makes it pretty clear to me that it is indeed right side up. Furthermore, you can see the marker ribbons at the top of the Bible, right where they should be.

Now before anyone accuses me of focusing on the wrong details, I’d like to point out that at least 2/3 of the posts I’ve seen (and there have been many of them) bring it up as an example of Trump’s awfulness that he’s holding the Bible upside down. My point is, you don’t need to make up something that is untrue to demonstrate that awfulness. Just the fact that he used the Bible as a weapon, having just ordered a vicious attack on American citizens, and that he perpetrated the stunt in front of a church...those things are horrible. We don’t have to make up details just to make the point that “hey, Donald Trump’s really dumb, isn’t he?” Yes, he is dumb, and he’s a horrible person. What he did on Monday was reprehensible, so please, let’s just stick with the facts. Thanks for reading.

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Esperanto & Ido & Klingon, Oh My!

The Corybantic Podacast: Episode 6 Wherein I describe the many rabbit holes I've been down over the past week: my experiences with Esperanto, Ido, and other conlangs. [The theme music is "A Good Bass for Gambling," written by Komiku. It is in the public do...

My most recent Corybantic Podcast episode, wherein I talk about my recent fascination with conlangs, and the rabbit holes I’ve been down as a result!

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Digging into the treasure of Roget’s Thesaurus

The podcast episode I released today was entitled “In Praise of Roget’s.” In it, I. talk for a short while about some of my favorite aspects of the many thesauri that bear the name “Roget’s.” I thought I would dig a little deeper into that topic on my blog, sharing a few thoughts on how a thesaurus like Roget’s works. I’ll be looking at a few different editions of Roget’s Thesaurus (several of which I mention in the podcast), and what they have in common, as well as what sets them apart from one another.

First of all, even though there are several different volumes that have been published with the name “Roget” in their titles, I will not be discussing the modern dictionary-type kind of thesaurus made popular in recent decades, e.g. Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus or Roget’s 21st Century in Dictionary Form. Whereas these volumes may very well be handy tools, they depart from the classification system that made Roget’s work so amazingly useful. You see, Roget’s Thesaurus was not merely a book of synonyms and antonyms. No, his book was a way of classifying the entire universe into concepts described by language. Roget’s system of classification was said to have been based on the philosophical work of Gottfried Leibnitz. Roget divided all of the concepts in his Thesaurus into six overall classes:  

I Abstract Relations

II Space

III Matter

IV Intellect

V Volition

VI Affections

An expanded version of Roget’s original classifications can be found at this Wiktionary article, and an even more detailed breakdown can be found here at the Wayback Machine. Each of the large classes listed above are then divided into more and more specific classes. Roget, a great lover of symmetry, originally came up with a total of 1,002 subclasses, but managed to whittle those down to 1,000, in order to have a more pleasing number. As subsequent editions of Roget’s work were released, the overall classes, as well as the subclasses beneath them, were gradually revised.

By the Third Edition of Roget’s International Thesaurus (1962), for example, the overall classes have evolved into eight categories:

I Abstract Relations

II Space

III Physics

IV Matter

V Sensation

VI Intellect

VII Volition

VIII Affections

These slightly different major classes increased Roget’s original 1,000 subclasses to a total of 1,040 subclasses. Notice how the class “Matter” has been broken into two classes: “Physics” and “Matter.” And the class “Intellect” has been broken into two classes as well: “Sensation” and “Intellect.” The amazing thing about this whole system, though, is that the curious reader need not limit himself to merely looking up a word and finding its synonyms. Rather, one may start with an overall category, such as “Intellect,” and take a wonderful trip down a rabbit hole! Looking at the 3rd ed. some more, if I begin with “Intellect,” that may lead me to “States of Mind,” which could lead to “Mental Attitudes,” which could then lead to “526. Curiosity.” It’s only at that point that the lists of synonyms occur!

I’m going to skip ahead in time to the Seventh Edition of Roget’s International Theaurus, edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer, Ph.D. (2010) By this time in history, editors had completely rethought Roget’s system of classification, and so we see 15 radically different major classes, divided into a total of 1,075 subclasses. It had been 110 years from the first edition of Peter Mark Roget (1852) to the previously mentioned Third Edition (1962). Just think of all of the technological developments from 1962 to 2010: the internet, computers, space travel, and a host of other technological developments! In the interest of not making this blog post ridiculously long, I shall only provide the 15 major classes of Kipfer’s work:

The Body and the Senses

Feelings

Place and Change of Place

Measure and Shape

Living Things

Natural Phenomena

Behavior and the Will

Language

Human Society and Institutions

Values and Ideals

Arts

Occupations and Crafts

Sports and Amusements

The Mind and Ideas

Science and Technology

You can easily see how much more specific these major classes are, compared to Roget’s vastly more overarching themes. Incidentally, it is worth noting that classes 7 and 14, “Behavior and the Will” and “The Mind and Ideas” are absolutely huge sections, much longer than most of the other classes! Meanwhile, it’s not just a different organizing principle from Roget’s system; it’s an entirely different way of observing the world around us.

I’d like to look at one other modern version of Roget’s Thesaurus, called Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus (1996). I find this one interesting, partly because it mixes in a lot of famous quotations (relating it to another reference ork that has been around almost as long as Roget’s: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. But it also has yet another system of classifications that is quite different from the ones we’ve seen previously. For one thing, the editors of this work don’t number their overall categories, and there are more of them, 24 in total. This leaves us with only 848 subclasses; I suppose, as the system of overall classification gets more specific, the editors didn’t see the need to divide those major categories into so many smaller subcategories. Looking at the list of 24 major classes, you will see some familiar themes to the 7th ed. listed above, with many different ones mixed in (I’ve numbered them for convenience, and to make sure I didn’t skip any):

Foundations of Knowledge

Living Things

Social Structure

Human Relations

Belief Systems

Provision

Health and Well-being

Occupations and Crafts

The Arts

Sports and Enjoyments

Communications

The Senses

Feelings

The Intellect and Ideas

Will and Behavior

Negotiations and Fiscal Relations

Power

Material Characteristics

Spatial Relations

Shape

Time

Motion

Abstract Relations

Condition

Just for fun, I’m going to take the example I used earlier, that led me to the topic of “Curiosity,” but I’m going to start at the other end. In Bartlett’s Roget’s, “321. Curiosity” is a subset of “The Intellect and Ideas.” A bit different nuance than the earlier example, where it was a subset of “Mental Attitudes,” which was a few steps down from the larger category of “Intellect.”

One more thing that all of these editions I’ve discussed have in common, that I think makes them immensely useful as a resource, is that the individually numbered categories, just before the various lists of synonyms are usually grouped in pairs of opposing concepts. For example, in the Bartlett’s Roget’s, “767. Arrangement” is followed by “768. Disturbance.” Or in the 7th International, “632. Expensiveness” is followed by “633. Cheapness.” I find this far more interesting than simply looking up the word “cheap,” and then merely seeing a list of synonyms and antonyms. The arrangement of the categories goes beyond simple pairings. There’s a sort of progressive development to a lot of the categories: for example, in the 3rd International, one can move from “582.  Sociability” to “583. Unsociability” to “584. Seclusion” to “585. Hospitality,Welcome” to “586. Inhospitality.” It doesn’t stop there, and some of the progressions make more sense than others.

Perhaps you can see why I love digging through a thesaurus of this type. There’s a reason Roget used the word thesaurus, a Latin word that was adapted from the Greek word θησαυρός (”treasure”). If you find a copy of one of these thesauri I’ve mentioned above, and begin digging through it, you may find it to be a treasure trove of words and concepts. Happy digging!