Roget's Thesaurus biased

Evan Coyne Maloney at Brain-Terminal has found a very interesting discrepancy in Roget's Thesaurus (which, BTW, is apparently not about a kid and his pet dinosaur. Hm, learn something every day.)

...a reader suggested checking out Roget's synonyms for liberal. There are three different entries; here are the the highlights:

advanced, altruistic, avant-garde, beneficent, benevolent, bighearted, bounteous, bountiful, broad-minded, charitable, enlightened, exuberant, flexible, free, generous, good Joe, handsome, high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, intelligent, interested, kind, left, lenient, magnanimous, open-hearted, philanthropic, rational, reasonable, Santa Claus, tolerant, unbiased, unbigoted, understanding, unprejudiced

Compare that verbal fellatio with this, from the word conservative:

bitter-ender, fearful, fogyish, fossil, fuddy-duddy, inflexible, obstructionist, old fogy, reactionary, red-neck, stick-in-the-mud, timid, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, white bread

Oh well, it's a boring book anyway. I was considering doing a book review, but there's hardly any plot, and it keep changing the subject all the time.

• coverage: Parrot Check, The Wide Awakes, Cao's Blog, Patriots for Bush, NIF

Posted by Danny Carlton at May 11, 2005 09:07 AM