1936 Roget's
Apr. 5th, 2005 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyLooking for something completely else, I came across the entry for DIM-SIGHTEDNESS. And read it, noting how many of the medical terms I could define either from direct personal experience or from spending way too much time in ophthalmologists' offices.
Under the subheading fallacies of vision it lists: refraction, distortion, illusion, mirage, phantasm, phantom; vision; specter, apparition, ghost; ignis fatuus (L.), will-o'-the-wisp.
The 1936 Roget's is my primary thesaurus, on the relatively rare occasions when I need one, because I understand the way it's laid out and it has the words I want. More recent thesauruses (thesauri? thesaures?) tend to have quietly tidied those words away out of sight, because they're written for college students trying to expand vocabularies perceived as inadequate (and we can leave the question of who's doing the perceiving open) rather than people who want to lie down and roll around naked in the language for a while.
But this entry just charms me. Utterly.
Under the subheading fallacies of vision it lists: refraction, distortion, illusion, mirage, phantasm, phantom; vision; specter, apparition, ghost; ignis fatuus (L.), will-o'-the-wisp.
The 1936 Roget's is my primary thesaurus, on the relatively rare occasions when I need one, because I understand the way it's laid out and it has the words I want. More recent thesauruses (thesauri? thesaures?) tend to have quietly tidied those words away out of sight, because they're written for college students trying to expand vocabularies perceived as inadequate (and we can leave the question of who's doing the perceiving open) rather than people who want to lie down and roll around naked in the language for a while.
But this entry just charms me. Utterly.
