Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
M v definition of an intel- lectual is anyone who can understand the fifteen-page 'Tabular Synopsis of Categories' at the front of Roget's Thesaurus. This is the pons asinorum of egg- headism and a bridge whicti this ass has never been able to cross. Compared with this, all other brain- ,. numbing tests of pure ratiocination—such as St. Anselm's Ontolo- gical Proof of the Existence of God, the plan of the New York subway, the genealogy of the Astor family, the plot of Wagner's Ring and the instructions for making a peacock in the Monkiri primer on the art of Japanese paper- folding—are as simple as a children's crossword. MY cynical theory used to be that Peter Mark ,RO8et slipped, the table into his exhaustive, and 'neNhaustible, treasure house simply as proof that ,the Compilation was harder work than it might look to the ignorant user. But Roget was a savant " almost incredible ingenuity and industry who solved so many problems during his ninety years that, at the end, he had to start inventing new Dues to keep himself busy. He entered Edinburgh University at fourteen and graduated as Doctor " Medicine at nineteen. Before he was twenty- lie he was writing letters to famous greybeards txPlaining to them where their researches had g°ne wrong. He pointed out to Dr. Beddoes the st7■Sniflicance of the rarity of consumption among _utchers and fishermen. He straightened out nulnphrey Davy on the effects of nitrous oxide 011 respiration. And Jeremy Bentham spent six Weeks consulting him about the best means of tilising metropolitan sewage. At the age of twenty-five he was one of the founders of the Manchester Medical School. He was briefly attracted to party politics, becoming private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Earl Grey, but packed it in after a month and went back to medicine. Like many geniuses, he was generous and open-hearted with his talents— working for eighteen years Without pay, for instance, as physician to a free dispensary he opened in London. Unlike many geniuses, he overcame the incomprehension and envy of con- ventional academics and in his fifties become Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution. Meanwhile, his restless intelligence was still searching for new occupations. He devised a logo-logarithmic slide rule (the mere name of which impresses the hell out of me), a calculating machine, and an almost friction-free balance with its fulcrum in a small barrel floating on water. Ordinary chess was too dull for Roget and he was the first man to discover a method by which it was possible to move a knight 'over every square of the chessboard without going twice over any one, commencing at a given square and ending at any other given square of a different colour.' As well as the Thesaurus (first published in 1852), he wrote many papers and articles including some definitive entries in the sixth and seventh editions of the Encyclopadia Britannica—a work which has rewarded him by including no mention of him in its current edition. It is a pity that he died ninety-five years too early to be made a Minister in Harold Wilson's Government.
Nevertheless, or rather, allthemore, I am baffled by the purpose of his 'Synopsis of Categories,' which seems to me useless either as an index, a contents list or a guide to usage. For some reason, many writers consider the Thesaurus a shameful and discreditable tool of their trade which is to be hidden away in the pornography cupboard and consulted only behind locked doors. They would no more admit that they obtained transfusions from it for their vocabulary than that they had picked up a piece of information from television. Perhaps they feel it makes writing too easy and quick, preferring to stare out of the window, patiently waiting for the fumbling tumblers of the brain to open that rusted filing cabinet where the right word lies on its bed of silk like an heirloom. I regard Roget as I regard the telephone-my hand req,ches for it automatically while my eye is still travelling along the typewritten line. With the minimum of mis-diallings and wrong numbers, I reach a string of possible choices, one of which is the word which has been hiding behind the bridge of my nose trying to dodge being called up for work. But I no more need to know how Roget con- structed the mechanics of his book than I need a leaflet by Wedgwood Benn to explain how my voice is transmitted along the telephone wires.
I have given up promising or threatening my- self that I. must one day mount a safari through that table just for the exercise and in order to prove that I have not lost my nerve face-to-face with a wild abstraction. There can be few people• who hunger and pine so anxiously as I do for a skeleton key to the universe, a street map of art and culture, a potted concentrate of history and philosophy. But whenever the man on the white horse rides up to the front door, promising to make all things plain by the magic formulas of Marx, or Einstein, or Freud, or Aquinas, or Wittgenstein, I can feel all my intellectual powers beset by panic, hastily drawing the curtains, shouting `No one at home' through the letter box, and bolting for the hills through the back garden.
I have come to the conclusion that for me pure thinking does not exist. I am literally unable to summon up a word without a picture attached- say `abstract' and I see a skeleton made of wire, 'concept' a thing like a pressure cooker, 'idea' a fluffy white cloud, 'logic' a wooden ruler. To keep all these images in some sort of coherent order is like trying to line up a litter of kittens. It is a mystery to me that I have been able to survive so long among colleagues and rivals whose minds seem to be laid out with the anti- septic correctness of a kitchen display at the Ideal Homes Exhibition.
Rogers Thesaurus is one of those rare master- pieces of systematisation which I find I can work without having to make sense of its plan. It came into my thoughts this week because of George Brown's reaction to the mild, schoolboy taunt of 'tadpoles.' I don't think I would mind being called a tadpole--it does at least suggest the possibility of development. Roget puts it in a list under 'Infant' with 'sapling, seedling; tendril, olive- branch, nestling; lava, caterpillar, chrysalis, cocoon; whelp, pullet, fry; codlin,-g; foetus, colt, pup; lamb,-kin: If a clever ad-man could plant the subliminal association of these images, all youthful, hopeful, frolicsome, growing things, in the unconscious of the ad-mass, the Labour Party would be in power for a generation. The opposing category does not, for some reason (no doubt made clear in the 'Tabular Synopsis of Categories'), give an antiphonal litany of ageing doting animals and plants. But any Government back-bencher with Roget by him could have fired off a string of nouns from the next heading 'Veteran.' You have to be careful with Roget,
though, because he tends to stick in weird dialec- tal forms, forgotten archaisms or strange tech- nical terms. From the 'Veteran' entry, for example, I can just imagine the Opposition rising in fury to ask the Speaker-1s it in order for one honourable member to call another honour- able member a "preadarnite" with all that this implies?' If we see Hansard reporting the sudden popularity of such epithets as `chaw-bacon,"gos- soon,"mudlark,' `pickthank,"toad-eater,' 'malapert,"caitiff,"larrikin,"rake-hell,"dastard,' and 'recreant,' we shall know the source-book in the Commons Library.
A quick, easy and foolproof way of con- structing a simple-minded insult is to take a string of adjectives connected with some disagree- able affection in Roget and add the name of someone you dislike at the end. I find this a use- ful form of cursing enemies in privacy-rather like telling beads. You can say aloud (from qmpurity')-`you smutty, obscene, bawdy, con- cupiscent, prurient, lickerish, lustful, carnal minded, lewd, lascivious, lecherous, libidinous, erotic, ruttish, salacious, voluptuous, incestuous, honourable, learned and gallant Member.' Or from Drunkene,ss; you can repeat-'you be- fuddled, sozzled, flushed, groggy, beery, toP. heavy, pot-valiant, screwed, tight, primed, oiled, muddled, muzzy, bosky, obfuscated, maudlin; blind-drunk, distinguished and respected Editor. Sometimes I wonder if this is how Cassandra writes his column in the Daily Mirror on a squally, bad-tempered day. I would be the last condemn him if he did-without Roget's Thesaurus my column would not have appeared this week, and many other weeks too.
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