Monday Musings

Authors, are you triggered by current events to incorporate the news into your writing? Readers, are you curious about the writing process? Here's a glimpse of how recent occurrences resulted in two poems. The recent flurry of articles about the Chinese Spy Balloon set my creative juices afire. Analogies flittered, and synonyms cavorted through my mind. Chinese, hmm, ah yes, Communist “red.” Was the conveyance really a meteorologic device, or was it a “Trojan” horse carrying advanced spy devices, or was it somehow inserting Trojan malware into our internet? And was the balloon a “carrier pigeon” to return the pilfered information to China? The words sorted and arranged, condensed into a senryu format, and voila! Poem number one:

The thesaurus, a book that serves as a cross-reference for synonyms, and serves as a guide to effective and precise use of language, is a necessary tool of every writer and even some readers. Dr. Mark Peter Roget (1779–1869) was a British natural theologian, physician, and lexicographer. He suffered from depression his entire life: beginning at the age of eight, his coping mechanism was obsessive list-making. He wrote the first draft of the eponymous English-language thesaurus in 1805, two years prior to Webster beginning the undertaking of his own dictionary. For 47 years he kept it a secret, and finally published it in 1852 at the age of 73, under the title  Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and to Assist in Literary Composition . This document is archived in the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum. Roget’s Thesaurus has been in continuous print. The original manuscript included 15,000 words; the Eighth Editi...