My father died when I was ten years old. Other than a photograph or two, I have only a few tangible objects that connect me to him. One thing I do have is his thesaurus.
Those of you born before the dawn of the Age of Google may think that I inherited my father’s dinosaur. A thesaurus is not a type of dinosaur. It’s a book that groups words together based on similarities in what they mean. A thesaurus can be used to find a word’s synonyms — words that mean the same thing — and its antonyms — words that mean the opposite.
My father’s thesaurus (a 1933 edition, shown in the picture above) is old and falling apart, but I love it because it reminds me of one of the most important things he gave me — a love for words. He was a writer himself, and he carefully “bound” the first book I wrote in a piece of plastic when I was 8 years old. I was thrilled to be a writer like the most important man in the world — my daddy.
People who love words tend to be a bit fussy about using the right word at exactly the right time, especially if we’re putting our words in writing. Before the invention of search engines, a thesaurus was one of the best tools available for finding exactly the right word.
The man whose name is synonymous with thesauruses (or thesauri, if you prefer) is Peter Mark Roget. The edition of his thesaurus that he published in 1852 was called Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged So As To Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. That title has too many words even for those of us who love words, so it is usually referred to as Roget’s Thesaurus.
Now that that a Google search can show us the synonyms for a word in a matter of seconds, it’s easy to forget just what a monumental accomplishment Roget’s thesaurus was. Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet wanted to make sure that Roget’s accomplishment isn’t forgotten. They are the author and the illustrator, respectively, of The Right Word, a picture book biography of Peter Roget.
The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus
By Jen Bryant
Illustrated by Melissa Sweet
The Right Word is the only children’s biography of Roget available, but that’s okay because it contains the equivalent of at least three books’ worth of brilliance and delight. It was awarded a Caldecott Honor and the Robert F. Sibert Medal, and rightly so.
The Right Word begins shortly after the death of Roget’s father 1783 when Roget was four. He and his mother and infant sister returned to England, but they moved often and he had few opportunities for making friends. Books became his friends, and making lists of words became his favorite pastime.
Roget completed medical school at the age of 19, but his uncle felt that he was too young to begin practicing medicine, so he became a tutor for a wealthy family and traveled with them throughout Europe for five years. He then became a physician in 1804. All the while, he kept making lists or words. Roget overcame his natural shyness and began giving lectures on a wide range of subjects, including magnetism, optics, anatomy, and chemistry. He also invented a portable chess set and a new version of the slide-rule. And he kept making lists of words.
The first edition of Roget’s thesaurus was published in 1852, and it’s been in print continuously ever since. Roget kept improving the book to make it more organized and easier to use.
The Right Word tells us that Roget wanted everyone to be able to use his word book, “not just doctors, politicians, and lawyers, but cobblers, fishmongers, and factory workers.” And though we are now apt to turn to the digital version of his thesaurus, we do look to it when writing resumes, letters of condolence, campaign speeches, and other documents that require the right word.
Those are the details of Roget’s life as described in The Right Word. But the book is much more than a simple biographical sketch. The illustrations were created with colorful, whimsical mixed-media collages that perfectly complement the text. They contain dozens of small details that make studying the pages feel like a treasure hunt.
For example, when Roget’s mother fusses over his health, he replies, “Mama, I’m fine.” The text explains that he then wondered if “fine” was the right word, and the illustrations show a flurry of colorful thought balloons reading “not bad,” “so-so,” “good, very well, dandy,” “never better,” and other synonyms for fine.
The back matter of The Right Word includes a list of principal events in Roget’s life, a bibliography, a list of sources, recommended reading, and a photo of a page from the original thesaurus. It also includes an author’s note and an illustrator’s note that lead me to believe that Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet came to admire and respect Peter Mark Roget while creating this book as much as I came to admire and respect him while reading it.
You can learn more about Jen Bryant at jenbryant.com/. More information about Melissa Sweet is at melissasweet.net/.
I hope that The Right Word will inspire young readers to begin making word lists of their own, just as Peter Mark Roget did hundreds of years ago.