Storytime:

“Silence Dogood, 31 years old, tall, dusty brown hair beginning to thin out a little at the top, grew it out in the back, a colonial mullet. He lived in Philadelphia, east side. He spoke carefully and hesitantly and would look you in the eye for an intense, occasional moment while gathering his thoughts with his rainy-day grey eyes and a mouth ready to drop a smile.

His pub of choice was City Tavern; John Adams called it “the most genteel tavern” in America. Dogood believed in one God, that he ought to be worshipped, and that the most acceptable service to him was to do good to his other children. It’s the 1700’s, though, and although drunkenness is an unfortunate vice that ensnares men, a good milk punch never hurt any man. Maybe on one of those long working days, stressed out because of the English and taxes, he saw an out-of-his-league bonnie lass, as a fresh as fresh can be with her once a week bath, shaped like a vanilla ice cream cone, decked out with foundation garments, proper petticoats, and a woolen cape. A discreet ask found her name to be Whinnet, a cute and proper colonial girl who didn’t have a second hand or first for him. (No time for nobody.)

It was on that day that Benjamin Franklin perhaps had one more milk punch than necessary and felt like he ate a toady and half for breakfast. What does a hurt founding father before he became a founding father do with negative energy? You drink another, and another one, and another one, and another milk punch and make it positive. He slow strolled out the tavern, pushed out by puritanical forefather virtues and by the roaring laughter of men and spirits: “You seeing two moons Do Good?””

The year was 1737 and at the age of 31 Benjamin Franklin, pen name Silence Dogood, published the first Drinker’s dictionary in the Pennsylvania Gazette. The original version had 225 entries of various phrases to describe drunkenness. Some of the entries were:

He's been among the Philippians.
He's contending with Pharaoh.
He ate a toady and half.
You seeing two moons.
His head is full of bees.
He’s been to Jericho.
Cherubimical.
Cherry Merry.
Wamble Crop'd.
Crack'd.
He’d kiss black Betty.

While the Drinker’s Dictionary was not the first thesaurus, it probably is one of the more entertaining ones. The first thesaurus was recorded in English approximately circa 1730 by a British doctor, Peter Mark Roget. The name Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was born.

“Thesaurus: from the Greek thēsaurós, meaning “storehouse,” “treasure,” or “treasury.”

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What is a Thesaurus, anyway?

a dinosaur looking at the camera — Question: What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? A Thesaurus.
Photo by @welarson

A Thesaurus is a dinosaur from the Jurassic period that was larger than a raptor and highly intelligent. While the raptor was cunning, fast, and would disembowel you with his elongated hooked claw, the Thesaurus was said to have the intelligence equal to a dolphin, chimpanzee, and pig combined, and a small child raised in a trilingual household. Paleontologists believe that just as the T-Rex used its brute strength and crushing bite force, the Thesaurus demanded attention and evoked fear with its extensive vocabulary and ability to spit out multiple expressions and descriptions for multiple feelings and situations without pausing, which would stupefy predators.

“Oh, my word! My goodness gracious! Still my beating heart, you are hungry, and drooling, releasing digestive enzymes in anticipation of a meal that you will not have on this day, time, and hour! I will turn around, reverse course, disappear, return to the place from which I came, and you will go, run, depart, and flee from this grassy knoll.”

On a more serious note, a thesaurus is a book or electronic resource that lists words in groups of synonyms and related concepts or put more simply in the Meriam Webster dictionary: a book of words and their synonyms.

I will use my pet peeve word “awesome” as an example for how a thesaurus works. I first heard the word used irregularly when boys from Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, and Colorado moved to Brooklyn; the next wave were Hipsters. “Where are you from?” they would ask.

I replied: “Queens.”

“Awwwww-some!” they replied. I must have had a quizzical look on my face as I mean Queens is a different borough, a different New York City experience. Some feel it’s a lesser borough, a step-borough, a family friend that’s not quite family, the distant relative, a lower cool factor; however, it is the place and home where I was raised. However, if it is truly awesome, I must up appreciation for the value of The Queens.

awesome

Explore 'awesome' in the dictionary

awesome

(adjective) in the sense of awe-inspiring

Definition

inspiring or displaying awe

Synonyms

stunning (informal)

awful (obsolete)

horrifying

fearful (informal)

wondrous (archaic, literary)

redoubtable

jaw-dropping

stupefying

gee-whizz (slang) *

rocking awesome (added by me)

wicked (added by me)

dope (added by me, archaic slang circa 1980s)

slamming (added by me, archaic slang circa 1990s)

fire (added by me, millennial slang)

da bomb (added by me, archaic slang)

https://www.freethesaurus.com/awesome

Please view chart in the hyperlink.

For me awesome is exclusively for God and his marvelous creation - a sunset dripping and screaming golden rays of liquid honey, midasizing (to touch with gold) cloud edges and boiling the evening sky into vermillion and crimson.

Awesome or wondrous is the thunder of a storm and the thunder under the hooves of an Andalusian, or an Arabian, pounding through desert sands trying to outrun his shadow and his hoof prints on hot amber sand.

Awesome, glorious and splendor is the shape of not a square, circle or pentagon, but the human being, the crowning masterpiece of earth, unfrozen with a breath of life, living, moving, breathing, speaking, dancing, creating, and procreating, not sculpted and set in wood, metal, or stone and trapped in one eternal contrapposto.

After the Bible, the dictionary, collections of proverbs from different countries, our family had a thesaurus in the family bookcase. Dad always said: “Never define a word with a word.” The children had to take a walk to the bookshelf and open up the dictionary to look up words or the thesaurus to find other ways to describe them.

January 18 is National Thesaurus Day. It is a day of appreciation for the history of the thesaurus, the right way to use one, and how it can broaden and expand one’s vocabulary, life experiences, emotional breadth and depth and level up one’s writing and speaking. The date falls on the date of birth of Mr. Peter Mark Roget.

How can we increase our vocabulary power?

When you don’t know the meaning of a word, look up the definition in the dictionary.
Instead of using common words in your vocabulary, use the thesaurus and find an alternative way to use that word.
To express the feelings that you experience, use the thesaurus to understand various phrases that are nuances of that feeling, or descriptions of the feeling in an intense degree or a lesser degree.
Understand the nuance of words and their power.
Instead of swearing, find another empowering way by using a thesaurus and increase your vocabulary to describe pain, anger, frustration, joy, and any other sensation in your experience.

Gaming

The Dictionary Game

Play the Describe a Person Thesaurus Game

Speaking of games, interestingly and ironically, Paul Dickson, a lexicographer and an author broke his own world record and made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for “Most Synonyms”(2,985) for - can you guess which word?

Photo by @nate_dumlao
**Whiskey Frisky**, one of the words in Paul Dickson’s book: Intoxerated, The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary.

Call to Action and Comment Below

Let’s pick another word to see how many synonyms we can come up with. You can use English, Spanish, Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic, Portuguese, any language you want. You can also comment with proverbs and idiomatic expressions. Forward to your friends and comment below.

The word is…. AMAZING. I look forward to your comments