Delores E. Topliff
When it’s time to paint a room in your home, you try to choose
the right color paint and the perfect specific shade of that color. That often
involves going to your favorite hardware or paint store to collect folders holding hundreds of paint chip color samples.
On
fresh spring days, I’ve looked outside and counted a thousand shades of green. Paint
stores prove I’m right. There are that many shades of green, and also equal variations of yellows, blues, whites, reds, and everything in between—so many they boggle the mind.
On a missions trip to the Philippines, I bought a freshwater pearl necklace that
was such a warm blend of peach, yellow, and cream, I desired to paint my living
room that color. By spending much time in my local paint store, I finally matched
the color chip and am surrounded by a beautiful living memory.
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Similarly in writing we want to create the perfect moods,
sensations, and expressions. We want to express things more evocative than that our hero or
heroine walked beneath a blue sky. If that sky is an especially descriptive blue, it helps us more
easily experience the scene and mood. Here are some word choices available
through the fabulous writing tool created almost two centuries ago by Peter Mark Roget, a British physician, natural theologian, and lexicographer. In the impressive compilation
of descriptive words he named a Thesaurus, his options for blue include aquamarine, azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo,
navy, royal, sapphire, teal, turquoise, sapphire, and ultramarine, and more.
His tool provides rich, textured word choices for colors, actions, and practically any
item or phenomenon
in this world. It
permits us to write with a full color palette. His work is an alphabetized catalog of
related word options. When he released it in 1852, he described his first Thesaurus
this way. “It is now nearly fifty years since I first projected a system of
verbal classification. Conceiving that such a compilation might help to supply
my own deficiencies, I had, in the year 1805, completed a classed catalogue of
words on a small scale, but on the same principle, and nearly in the same form,
as the Thesaurus now published.
His original 1852 Thesaurus contained
15,000 words. Since then each edition has been larger. Jane Weber, my amazing 9th grade creative
writing teacher in Vancouver, Washington, gave each of her fifteen students a paperback Thesaurus. That is just one of many ways she
inspired and changed our lives. I personally love to roam the descriptive lists
of color choices that to me are more delicious than the flavors available at our local
Baskin Robbins.
When
did you first see or use a Thesaurus?
How
often do you use one? What are some of your favorite word finds there?
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