![]() While I valued the words Roget’s packed volume gave me, I admit I never gave its creator or the book’s origins much thought. I dedicated an hour each day to reading them-30 minutes for Will and 30 minutes for the next section of the thesaurus-adding words like “multitudinous” and “bombastic” to my treasure trove. On my sixteenth birthday, my stepdad gave me a bound volume of Shakespeare and a paperback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. A life spent reading is a life spent addicted to words. Words comforted, delighted, and inspired me. I was a voracious reader and each book I read added more words to my horde-“radiant” from Charlotte’s Web, “chortle” from Alice in Wonderland, “nerd” from Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo. I still remember my sister, Abbie, complaining to our mother, “Tell her to stop using words I don’t know!” ![]() ![]() I knew I couldn’t pinch them or lock them in a closet, so I used my vocabulary to exact my revenge-calling them dolts, nitwits, and nettlesome prats whenever they pushed me too far. Whining, breaking my things, interrupting me while I was reading, my little sisters were the bane of my childhood existence. “Words-so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”-Nathaniel Hawthorne ![]()
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