Tuesday 29 March 2016

Clicking vs page flipping

Digital vs Analog World Revelation - of a kind that I experience on a semi-regular basis.  This morning I was doing a spot of writing.  I wanted a synonym.  Click on my Dictionary-Thesaurus software.  It comes from the "New Oxford American Dictionary", which gives it some street cred, I guess.  Still, this morning it wasn't helping me.  All the synonyms came off as bland and common.

I went to the web, checking some of my old bookmarks for Thesauruses.  "Bland and common" don't capture how sad their word offerings were.  Suffice to say, they are no longer bookmarked.

I teetered on the edge of seriously stopping the writing process to start trawling the web for a decent dictionary thesaurus site…and then it hit me.  I spun my chair around, went to my book shelf and hauled down my Roget's International Thesaurus (4th Ed).  The one with the three inch wide spine.  It had an embarrassing amount of dust on it.  After brushing it off, I enjoyed a wonderland of rediscovery.  WORDS WORDS and MORE WORDS!  Swimming and splashing in wonderful words.

Did my creative heart a lot of good, I tell you.  I not only found the word(s) I could use, but I didn't burn off who-knows-how-long wandering the internet trying to find a source.

Back to work!


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