49. Thesaurus

The word thesaurus is New Latin for treasure; coined in the early 1820s. Besides its meaning as a treasury or storehouse, it more commonly means a listing of words with similar or related meanings. For example, a book of jargon for a specialized field; or more generally a list of subject headings and cross-references used in the filing and retrieval of documents. (Or indeed papers, certificates, letters, cards, records, texts, files, articles, essays and perhaps even manuscripts.)

The first example of this genre, Roget's Thesaurus, was published in 1852, having been compiled earlier, in 1805, by Peter Roget.

Although including synonyms, entries in a thesaurus should not be taken as a list of synonyms. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between similar words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Nor does a thesaurus entry define words. That work is left to the dictionary.

In Information Technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology.

Examples

Roget's Thesaurus is the world's best-known thesaurus, created by Dr. Peter Mark Roget (1779 - 1869) in 1805 and was released to the public in 1852. The original edition had 15,000 words, and each new edition has been larger. The Karpeles Manuscript Library houses the original manuscript in its collection.

Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual "meaning clusters" or semantically linked words. These words are not exactly synonyms, but can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept. One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.

Roget's Thesaurus can be seen as a classification system, as evidenced by the outline from the 1911 US edition, now in the public domain.

44. The simile

 Figurative language is a tool that an author employs (or uses) to help the reader visualize (or see) what is happening in a story or poem. Some common types of figurative language are: simile, metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia, idiom, puns, and sensory language.

A simile is a poetic comparison using like or as. It usually compares two dissimilar objects.

For example: His feet were as big as boats. We are comparing the size of feet to boats. She is like a rainy day. He is as busy as a bee. They are like two peas in a pod

The simile is an "indirect comparison" because of its limited scope in transferring or "transforming" meaning in the comparison. For example, consider the following simile:

John runs like a fox.

Notice that usually in similes only one attribute is affected in the comparison between "John" and "fox"--the way John runs.

Metaphor

The strongest of the comparisons is the metaphor. A metaphor is a "direct comparison" since the metaphor so often suggests complete transformation in the figure of speech. Here's an example:

John is a fox.

In this construction, every attribute of "fox" is carried, by implication, to John--in short, a complete transformation. Notice, however, that you will rarely find a metaphor constructed so directly and simplistically.

Types of Metaphor Constructions

The Simple Metaphor

The simple metaphor is illustrated above. A direct equation is stated, transforming the primary subject into the secondary subject.

The Collapsed Metaphor

In the collapsed metaphor, the linking verb--the verbal "equals" sign, is dropped, creating grammatically an apositive (a noun followed by its definition):

John, the fox, . . .

The Abstracted Metaphor

An "abstraction" is the reduction of a subject to its most basic or selected distinctive features.  An example is a line drawing of a person or some figure.  The full "reality" of the subject is reduced to a two-dimensional rendering. The same effect can occur in verbal abstractions.  In the case of the abstracted metaphor, the primary subject is deleted, retaining only the secondary subject, as in this example:

- - - "fox"

as in the expression:

"Hey! Let's call ol' "fox." He'll go bowling tonight.

The Inverted Metaphor

In the inverted metaphor, the primary and secondary subjects are switched in the sentence frame to create an "adjective-noun" construction. Here's an example:

foxy John

and you may snicker because you realize that, in English as in the idioms of other languages as well, "word order" affects "word meaning"--that "John, the fox" doesn't carry quite the same message as "foxy John"!

The Functional Metaphor

The functional metaphor is perhaps the most powerful of the metaphorical constructions since the meaning of the secondary subject is transformed into action--the noun literally becomes a verb. Check out this example, still at the expense our friend John:

Man! What a guy! Old John--he sure outfoxed me!

The simplest and also the most effective poetic device is the use of comparison. It might almost be said that poetry is founded on two main means of comparing things: simile and metaphor. We heighten our ordinary speech by the continual use of such comparisons as "fresh as a daisy," "tough as leather," "comfortable as an old shoe," "it fits like the Paper on the wall," "gay as a lark," "happy as the day is long, pretty as a picture." These are all recognizable similes; they use the words "as" or "like."