For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for November 14, 2017

Well, Elly, I hate to break it to you but this is a bad idea. A thesaurus will have curse words in it. You may be giving Mike a way to learn new curse words.

oh, har-dee-har-har, Mike… enough with the paleontology puns already

Dinosaurs didn’t die a million years ago.

SPOILER ALERT

Hard to believe that Mike ends up as a writer when he’s so allergic to words other than curses…

Uggghhhh, one of my pet peeves. It’s "I bought you each a thesaurus not both. Since there are two books it’s each, if they were expected to share one book it would be both.

A thesaurus: a writer’s best friend. Also known as: how to describe something without using the same words twenty zillion times in a paragraph.

We don’t see Ellie using a very voluminous vocabulary either. Just saying.

As someone who wrote a lot of poetry in my younger days (the joy of English majors), my thesaurus was my BIBLE. I still have one, even though I can obviously use a virtual one on my computer.

I actually had to do this for a Junior High English class only we used a dictionary. Fun fact: everyone in my family comes to me when they want to spell a word or know its definition. Guess it worked.

Every year since 1982 my mother has given me a Word of the Day Calendar. It’s pretty interesting.

Choice of words is always a balance between precision and being understood. I let it slide when I hear somebody use “blatant” (which means loud) in place of “flagrant” (which means unabashed). I guess if’n it’s okey dokey with y’all, it’s copacetic with me.

Is there a synonym for “thesaurus”?

How can you expect the kids to improve their English if you don’t know the basic difference between “Each” and “Both”?

My Roget’s and my Strunk & White, both well-worn from use, are my most beloved and essential writing companions.

I tend to talk to kids – including my own – like they actually have a brain. When my daughters were toddlers we had a bath game where I would ask them a question and, when they answered, I would wipe the answerer’s face with a facecloth, muffling what they say…then I would tell them, “Don’t mumble! You need to enunciate!” They loved this game. When my older daughter was in kindergarten, each child had to “bring a word from home” written on a piece of paper. While most kids brought words like, “cat”, “book”, or “bed”…she brought “enunciation”.

She wants them to learn lots of new words – but only the RIGHT new words!

They would learn lots of new words watching late-night TV or going to R-rated movies!

Thesauruses went extinct even longer ago than dictionaries – but they both only found in the fossil records these days!

We used to use the OED to find Middle English curse words.

What is a synonym? A word you use if you can’t spell the first one!

Lynn’s Notes:

My mother did this. She bought my brother and I each a thesaurus and we were to learn a new word each day. Far from resenting this project, we enjoyed it. If you want to express yourself well, you need a vocabulary!

The punch line is even more relevant these days. In fact, when this strip was initially out, we did use a thesaurus at school!

dank meme