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<\/p>\nToday, a client who I built a video-on-demand server farm for said that we need to call our “video” service something else because every time he talks about it in meeting full of old school faculty and administrators, they keep thinking he is talking about VHS tapes, despite the whole context of his presentation being about education over the internet. There isn’t much I can do about this of course, but I told him I’d dust off my Roget’s Thesaurus.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Billy Collins wrote a poem about this odd sort of reference book.<\/p>\n
Thesaurus<\/strong><\/p>\n
It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
\nthat roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
\non its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
\nor some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.<\/p>\nIt means treasury, but it is just a place
\nwhere words congregate with their relatives,
\na big park where hundred of family reunions
\nare always being held,
\nhouse, home abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs
\nall sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
\nhairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
\nall running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
\ninert, static, motionless, fixed, and immobile
\nstanding and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.<\/p>\nHere father is next to sire and brother close
\nto sibling, separated only by find shades of meaning.
\nAnd every group has its odd cousin, the one
\nwho traveled the farthest to be here:
\nasterognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
\nsyllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
\nEven their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.<\/p>\nI can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
\nI rarely open it, because I know there is no
\nsuch thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
\naround people who always assemble wit their own kind,
\nforming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
\nwhile others huddle alone in the dark streets.<\/p>\nI would rather see words out on their own, away
\nfrom their families and the warehouse of Roget,
\nwandering the world where they sometimes fall
\nin love with a completely different word.
\nSurely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
\nnext to each other on the same line inside a poem,
\na small chapel where weddings like these,
\nbetween perfect strangers, can take place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n