The Roget’s Thesaurus sported more than 700 pages of synonyms and antonyms for just about any word imaginable.
The thesaurus’s importance was drastically elevated by the fact that one of my daughters had presented it to me as a gift when she became a press gallery journalist, too.
During those years, the actual need for a heavy dictionary or a 700-page thesaurus receded in inverse proportion to the rise of the internet. We need only google the meaning of a word these days, or ask for a synonym or an antonym, and it is delivered at the speed of light.
But I couldn’t jettison the great tomes, knowing the toil that had gone into them.
Peter Roget himself started gathering words in 1805, possibly to cope with depression, when he was a 26-year-old British doctor. He eventually published the first edition of his thesaurus in 1852 when he was 73.
The Oxford’s genesis came in 1857 when members of Britain’s oldest learned gathering, the Philological Society, began collecting words that had been overlooked by existing references.
Soon emerged the idea of an entirely new dictionary which sought to record every known fragment of the English language. It became the Oxford.
How could I abandon the descendants of these great historical works simply because the internet had rendered my printed versions all but obsolete?
But then, about a dozen years ago, I moved to Melbourne and most of my collected press gallery detritus ended up tragically left behind.
Months later, I was beginning a satisfying new desk cluttering in Melbourne when some genius in management decided to introduce a system known as hot-desking.
This was a blend of musical chairs and the hunger games.
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There were fewer desks than people. Journalists had to find themselves a new seat each day and clear the chosen desk by the evening.
The system, we were informed, “would encourage flexibility and agility”, and “drive efficiency and enhance team communication”.
Best to stay home, really, which was the unspoken purpose of what, stripped of the buzzword, was an attempt to save money by reducing rented space.
In the absence of a permanent desk, each of us was allocated a locker for belongings like laptops and books.
This was desperate news for my latest collections of books, pens, notebooks etc. They wouldn’t fit in my little locker.
Aghast, I found a few storage boxes and squirrelled precious possessions in various secret cupboards that, possibly illegally under the terms of hot-desking, turned out to be empty.
And then I forgot where I’d hidden the stuff. The lovely Oxford English Dictionary never emerged from its hidey hole, wherever that may have been, or it was spirited away by persons unknown.
Happily, Roget’s Thesaurus found a nesting place in my locker. And somewhere along the way, I acquired a Shorter Oxford Dictionary, though its spine was missing.
Eventually, a large round of redundancies made hot-desking as obsolete as a floppy disc. This should have been perfectly predictable to any management genius taking notice: hot-desking was invented by a US advertising company in 1994 and abandoned as a sour joke a few years later.
We moved offices again, and glory be, I found a new permanent desk.
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I’m still there.
My collection of books and old newspapers and other stuff has been growing very satisfactorily, despite the hopes of executives who once dreamed of something called the paperless office.
My old Roget’s Thesaurus reclines in pride of place. It may be an antiquated method of finding a synonym, but what could I tell my daughter if it disappeared? Anyway, it’s been through a lot and deserves mercy.
Unaccountably, however, Roget’s doesn’t appear to have the perfect word to describe my method of maintaining a desk.
I’d need my lost Oxford English Dictionary for that.
Shambolic (adj).
The Oxford records the earliest citation for this splendid word as having appeared in The Times of London on June 18, 1970.
Marvellously, the source is from an article concerning a journalist and his desk:
“His office in Printing House Square is so impeccably tidy that it is … a standing reproach to the standard image of shambolic newspaper offices.”
The unnamed writer apparently thought this observation was amusing. A pursed-lips type, obviously.
Tony Wright is associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
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