Now and again I’m asked to review a book on this site; sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t (because sometimes the books sound really bad. Even if I don’t like them, I still have to read them!). When I was asked to review Peter Meltzer’s second edition of The Thinker’s ThesaurusI agreed immediately because it sounded interesting, but also because I was a little bit skeptical, a combination which normally makes for a balanced review, right?

I remember as a child having a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that my mother or father had handed down to me. When I’d got it, I’d been excited about how I could use a lot of different words when I wrote a story. I think I opened it about twice. That experience, along with advice I received from teachers along the way, made me the kind of writer that only uses a word that I would use in a conversation. Well, sometimes I guess I write using slightly more complicated words than the vocabulary I reserve for general conversation, but not much.

And that’s why, upon receiving my hefty copy of Meltzer’s Thinker’s Thesaurus, my immediate reaction was that while the concept – “sophisticated alternatives to common words” – was a nice enough one, and it might be good for people attempting to complete crosswords, it was something I would never use for my own writing. Delving in at random to find alternatives for words I sometimes struggle to replace: for “nice”, the suggestions are “sympathique” or “prepossessing”. As in that’s a sympathique dress? Prepossessing weather today?

Okay, I’m being facetious, but I’m just trying to illustrate my feeling at the start. The fact is, 90% of the words suggested as alternatives are words that are beyond my vocabulary. Now, I’m pretty well-read, and pretty highly educated, so I don’t think my vocabulary is particularly bad. That means if I used these words in my writing, the vast majority of my readers wouldn’t understand them, and to me that didn’t sound like a very desirable state of affairs. But then I read more of the blurb at the front of The Thinker’s Thesaurus and well, it got me thinking. Is it necessarily a bad thing to sparingly use some words that few people know – as long as the context makes it clear? Now and again I do come across words I don’t know in books I read, and it doesn’t get me down. It actually interests me. Of course, if such words came along every sentence I’d stop reading the book, but discretely used when they offer a suitable alternative to the word you would otherwise be overusing? I’m still not sure but I am at least open to the possibility of using “sophisticated alternatives”. And if I ever get into writing poetry this book would be the first thing I’d pick up. So while I’m not yet a 100% convert to the use of The Thinker’s Thesaurus by fiction writers, I’m open to change – and if nothing else it’s truly an interesting book to thumb through.

We’ll feature a guest post by Thinker’s Thesaurus authoer Peter Meltzer shortly – in which he gives us another good reason why the world needs a few more difficult words to be in use.

Tags: book reviews, Peter Meltzer, thesaurus, vocabulary

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