At a certain point when you’re writing a book that is over 100,000 words you come to the uncomfortable but inevitable realization that you’re using the same damn words all the time. MS Word has an integrated thesaurus but the options it provides are obvious and largely include the words you’re already overusing.
So the newly updated Describers dictionary seemed perfect. Need a word for something that smells bad? Take 22:
Noxious, rank, noisome, stinking, fetid, miasmic, foul, malodorous, putrid, rotten, offensive, nasty, vile, olid, poisonous, rancid, repellent, sulfurous, graveolent, smelling to high heaven, nidorous, toxic
The book contains a full 5 pages of terms that can be used to describe unspecific quantities including scintilla, profusion, squirt, patch, congeries, or the ever popular boatload.
Fun stuff right?
Conceptually I love this book. Are many of the terms provided so pretentious and incomprehensible that even Webster’s dictionary doesn’t know what they are? Sure. You could cut out 20% of the terms of the book as unusable because even the most well-educated reader is unlikely to know that hederiform means “ivy-leaf-shaped.” But the remaining 80% are great.
But here’s the problem. The subtitle of this book is, “A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations.” The book is 596 pages long. There’s approximately 100 pages of terms and 496 pages of literary quotations. By my math if 80% of the book is quotations then the accurate title of this book should be, “The Book of Pretentious Literary Quotations” and the subtitle should be “Some Helpful Terms for Writers Who Describe Stuff.”
Thus I’m a bit chuffed about paying $14 for a 100 page literary thesaurus where at least 20% of the words are insufferably unusable. On the other hand if you’re looking for 8 pages of terms for colors, this book is for you.
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