Joshua Kendall
The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus
Monday, March 24, 7:00 p.m.
Brookline Booksmith

Do u luv txtspk? Do u IDK ur BFF Jill? (Don’t worry, we know nobody does that, except in commercials.) R u totes 4gtg rl wrds? Joshua Kendall wants to help. His thoughtful new biography of Peter Mark Roget, the man who wrote Roget’s thesaurus (in longhand, at that), reveals the importance of not only word choice but also the relationships between words. Kendall, who’s currently working on a biography of Noah Webster (the guy behind the dictionary), thinks that the “printed word is under assault” in our culture, and feels a calling to write about “crazy lexicographers” in an effort to raise our awareness of language. Bostonist had a chance to talk with Kendall about the process of writing a book about the “immortal book” (Kendall’s words) that is the thesaurus. We got his thoughts on Roget’s life, Webster’s contributions, and ways to get Americans to think more about their word choices. Read more after the jump, and make sure to go hear Kendall speak tomorrow night at Brookline Booksmith.

A lifelong “word nerd” fascinated by Latin, Kendall found even more impetus to write about Roget when a number of materials from Roget’s life were made available through auction in 1992 after Roget’s great-grandson, John Roget, became debilitated by Alzheimer’s. These items included the original manuscript of the thesaurus from 1805, Roget’s journal from 1795, and the 1852 draft of the thesaurus. With the help of these materials, as well as several rare thesaurus predecessors (including Bishop John Wilkins’ 1668 Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, and Hester Lynch Piozzi’s 1794 British Synonymy) housed at the Boston Athenaeum, Kendall was able to compile a comprehensive account of Roget’s life and the birth of the thesaurus as we know it today.

Though the thesaurus (the term derives from the Latin word for treasure) itself sparkles with endless possibility and meaning, Roget’s life was slightly less interesting. Raised largely by his grandparents due to his mother’s need to attend to his father’s health problems, Roget had an unhappy childhood. When his mother was able to take over his upbringing, he found himself dealing with a controlling, emotionally unstable woman who wanted Roget’s achievements to compensate for her own shortcomings. Alternately ignored and oppressed by his family, Roget sought refuge in organizing words and concepts—things he could control. As Kendall notes, “As long as [Roget] understood how all these abstractions [in his lists] related to one another, he felt that he had nothing to fear.” Kendall also observes that Roget’s diaries from his youth—first made available at that 1992 auction—reveal some confused, unoriginal writing that would have benefited from the use of a thesaurus.

“More interested in words than in people,” according to Kendall, Roget had a preference for the orderly that was only heightened by his family’s emotional disorders. One of the most surprising discoveries Kendall made in his research was the “extent of madness in Roget’s life.” Not only was his mother emotionally troubled, but Roget’s famous uncle Samuel Romilly (pictured) committed suicide, his sister languished in lovesick despair for years, and his own daughter, Kate, was severely depressed. Despite Roget's first-hand experience with so much mental anguish, he could be surprisingly brutal. He dismissed his sister's lovesick state and chose his mistress over his daughter late in life, causing Kate increased distress. Whether this coldness was intentional or merely a product of his analytical personality, dealing with emotional issues directly was not one of Roget's strengths.

But categorization was. Though you might expect the originator of the thesaurus to have a literary background, Roget approached words from more of a scientific perspective than a literary one. Trained as a doctor, Roget also lectured and wrote extensively on anatomy, physiology, and other topics. In his first lecture on physiology, he divided the field into four classes: mechanical functions, respiratory functions, nervous functions, and reproductive functions. Roget further divided mechanical functions into mechanical properties of cellular texture, chemical composition of cellular substance, membraneous connections, provisions for the defence of the body, and muscular actions. While his classifications may not be completely correct according to today’s medical science, they provide insight into how his mind worked to divide concepts into related groups. Kendall posits that Roget felt an intense “internal pressure” to properly classify items, and says that Roget found “his place in the world” by organizing words and ideas. As Kendall notes, any type of classification is "ultimately arbitrary” and reveals more about the classifier than the classified.

The Man Who Made Lists focuses on the listmaker’s classifying obsession, but also reaches beyond it, creating a meticulously detailed account of a both fascinating and frustrating man. While the biography doesn’t completely illuminate Roget and his motivations—to do so might be impossible—it succeeds in painting a reasonably clear picture of an unusually driven man and the myriad accomplishments of his life. In addition to drafting the first thesaurus, Roget also worked to revolutionize public health by popularizing sanitation and created the log-log scale that allowed for easier calculation of multiplication and roots. Additionally, one of Roget’s papers on optics posited that the mind registers a series of still images as moving, leading in part to the development of the movies (or, originally, moving pictures). Roget made lists, but he did much more as well.

Roget’s thesaurus—which was preceded by a variety of treatises on synonymy and language, covered by Kendall in impressive detail—has been extensively revised over the years, both to include new words and to accommodate new arrangement. Most American versions of the thesaurus are arranged alphabetically, while the British version uses numbers to categorize words by topic, as Roget did in his original lists. Kendall finds that the British version allows for greater relation of words to each other, prompting additional questions and insights about the meanings of the terms. For example, Kendall was recently browsing through the British version and came across the entry for "change." Since this term has been (over)used in the 2008 election nominations process, Kendall checked out the synonyms for it and began to think about what kind of change each election really envisions. If our politicians would be more precise in their use of language, we could better understand their priorities and how they plan to achieve them. (Interestingly, the first synonym for “change” listed at Thesaurus.com is “chicken feed.” Chew on that for a while.)

In keeping with his mission to popularize correct word usage, Kendall is currently working on a biography of Noah Webster, who created the first American dictionary. Webster and Roget were similar in that they were both wordsmiths, but "not really literary," according to Kendall. Rather, the two men were "compilers" who preferred to collect information rather than craft meaningful literature. This puts them in contrast to Samuel Johnson, developer of the first English dictionary, who has the "soul of a poet." Kendall recently wrote a Psychology Today article about the high-functioning, obsessive compulsive personalities of Roget and Webster in which he suggests that "only OCPD need apply" for tasks like writing a thesaurus or dictionary. "If I thought about writing a dictionary from scratch, it might give me a nervous breakdown," says Kendall, whereas that activity might have actually prevented nervous breakdowns for Webster and Roget. These high-minded men grounded their high-anxiety personalities in organizing language. Kendall’s enthusiasm for the topic suggests that his biography of Webster will be equally as fascinating as his coverage of Roget.

The epilogue to The Man Who Made Lists criticizes Microsoft Word’s Thesaurus feature as an incomplete thesaurus that provides an easy shortcut rather than an enlightening grouping of related concepts. The ease of finding a different word—without thinking about what that word should be or mean—may be part of what’s decreasing our ability and willingness to use words thoughtfully. In contrast to the electro-thesaurus' easy outs, and other modern ways of enabling casual and thoughtless writing, Kendall feels that Roget would conceive of the thesaurus as a way "not to get out of thinking but to think harder." Here’s hoping Kendall and his book(s) will make at least some of us think harder—and write better.

Book image from Riverhead books, Samuel Romilly image form http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/, Peter Mark Roget Image from http://royalsociety.org/