"Rarely used words, non-English words, names, obsolete and unidiomatic expressions, phrases: all are thrown in together along with common words without any apparent principle of selection. For example, in the fourth edition of – one of the best of the conceptually arranged works – we find included under the subheading orator: Demosthenes, Cicero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, William Jennings Bryan. Why not Pericles and Billy Graham? When one starts to include types of things, where does one stop? There is actually a list of insects (paragraph 414.36), which is even more of a random sampling than that of orators. Such works are a potpourri of everything the compiler can think of."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Sidney Landau,
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thesaurus
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thesaurus
3 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thesaurus →
Related Quotes
"In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don't talk about the words they list. They are also …"
"Thesauri are valuable structures for Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled voc…"
"Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and …"
"When the seas of life get rough, some readers look for escape, while others dive right in. So it is , when many book …"
"People who read tend to commit fewer s, I guess. I think that one of the reasons for that isn’t just that they’re bri…"
"Real life is overrated. But as readers we can escape to any elsewhere our heart desires – and at present all my heart…"
"Such forgeries were common enough... So unenviable was the reputation that priests had acquired in this matter that I…"
"The very best proof of how much writing mattered was the forgeries. Forgery had been an ecclesiastical habit for cent…"
"The present generation has this ingrained weakness, that it thinks that nothing discovered by the moderns is worthy t…"
"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jo…"