NOW READING: Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms (1960)

It may come as a surprise that I chose another sort of dictionary for my third book but this is one I’ve been looking forward to. While the word dictionary is in the title, it’s a very lean book- just 142 pages. I’m taking a relaxed approach to getting through it though. This will be another very dry read, but one that I want to pay more attention to than the thesaurus.

I bashed plenty of words of Latin origin during my read of the dictionary, so karma has me swimming against a current of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes with this book. Donald J. Borror assembled this reference piece to provide students and members of the scientific community with a handy guide for discerning both the meaning and pronunciation of many of the naming roots in many areas of science, especially biology. It may be small but it is dense and broad in scope.

This is the first book in Project Bookshelf that has a story attached to it. I acquired my copy of this book when I took an advanced biology class during my senior year of high school. It was a hard but rewarding class. At times, I spent a couple of hours each night reading and working on homework, making it one of the five most study-intensive classes I think I ever took.

I don’t remember how much of my study time involved my nose being stuck in this book in particular, but the book itself was significant enough to leave a mark. Its cover is worn, folded, and cracked. The page corners are all curved out one direction or another, some even still bearing the scars of being folded over for quick reference. I come to it not as an adversary, but as an old friend.

I plan on highlighting the most interesting prefixes and suffixes that I come across. That aspect of my update posts will be completely subjective. I also plan on looking for the root words in this book that come from sources other than Greek and Latin. Perhaps I’ll even keep a tally. This all will slow me down a little but I’m confident that this book won’t even take me as long as the thesaurus.

What’s Another Word for Thesaurus? Finished!: My Roget’s II Thesaurus Review

All the way through reading the thesaurus, I was hard on it. I’m not some ivory-tower dwelling linguist, but I know enough words to not need to use the thesaurus the way the introduction section sells it. Using the thesaurus to add color and bigger words to your writing may feel satisfying but it can also make you look foolish. I do, however, have to concede a few points its way.

Toolbox Level 1: A-
Remember this category? It’s the engineering of writing (vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and mechanics). Much like the dictionary, the thesaurus is all about vocabulary. I only caught a handful of spelling errors, none of which were the main word entry. Rather, all spelling errors came in the short sentence or fragment examples of proper use of the word. This rating is a bit of a cop-out when you consider that most of this book was just single words in rapid succession. The dictionary was the same way.

Toolbox Level 2: A-
Just like the dictionary, the thesaurus, as a reference book, defies much of what anyone can throw at it from a stylistic analysis perspective. The only style here lies in the introduction section, which was pretty straight-laced. The rest is just words, fragments, and occasional sentences. This feels like a cop-out too but I am hopeful that I can rein in this category and Toolbox Level 1 more as I hit books with actual style to evaluate.

Fulfillment of Purpose: B-
The people at Roget’s want you to use this book to fluff your writing and possibly expand your everyday vocabulary. The former makes me gag and the latter seems like a lofty goal. Vocabulary is something you either have or you don’t. You can build it up but only if you expose yourself to it in use. I think you are more likely to remember words when you hear them coming from the mouths of others. I found a few new-to-me words while reading the dictionary, but I haven’t put many of them to use. The environments I find myself in certainly don’t use them and they may not even be appropriate for most of them anyway.

At the end of the day, I have to concede that most of the synonym suggestions my thesaurus lays out are in-bounds. I still hate the fact that there was only a halfhearted caution about context. If you want to use a word that you aren’t 100% comfortable with because it’s not already in your vocabulary, please look up the definition of the word in the dictionary and pay attention to all possible definitions and even the etymology.

Similar to the dictionary, I have to wonder about the future of print thesauri. Having one handy may be useful for a quick check in an office, dorm room, or the home, but most people are carrying around smartphones that double as powerful inquisitorial tools. Merriam-Webster keeps some information behind a pay wall with their definition contents but I don’t see how an online thesaurus could keep much hidden without being abandoned and becoming irrelevant.

Reading Experience: C-
The thesaurus rates higher than the dictionary in this category because it was so much easier and faster to read. After a bitter fight to the end with the dictionary, I kept myself detached while reading the thesaurus. There’s very little to latch onto here, so I made “it’s just a bunch of words” my mantra for the 175 days it took to read it.

Points of interest were few and far between. Maybe part of that is due to my cold approach to the book. I didn’t give it much of a fair shake but I still believe it didn’t warrant much of one to begin with. There were times when the act of reading became a bit of a chore but there weren’t spirit-crushing lengthy ruts to contend with. I read it to read it and get it out of the way. The thesaurus gave about as much pushback to that goal as I expected.

Overall Score: 2.917 out of 4 (high B-)
Of course the thesaurus would come away with the same score as the dictionary. Why not? Their journeys to a high B- had different paths but it’s a fitting score. One was informative but bothersome to work through. The other was easy to read but void of anything approaching engaging reading. The thesaurus is another book that’s just not meant to be read cover to cover like this but it can be done. To do so in such a short span of time after completing the dictionary gives me the feeling of momentum. I hope it’s not a false sense though.