The Ideology of the Thesaurus

2024/09/23

In my high school senior literature class, one of my classmates had a downright religious objection to repeating words. That is, if we were peer-grading essays on Jane Eyre and I used the term "marriage" twice in a 100-word span, she would circle both. This is based on an old creative writing saw: "Watch your word choice" or, less euphemistically, "Don't repeat words". Noted icon of misplaced hagiomania J.K. Rowling, for example, famously replaced most instances of "said" with words like "bellowed", "whimpered", and "ejaculated". At the extreme, we get classic fanfic-ese like calling eyes "cerulean orbs" and named characters epithets like "the blonde". And this idea has permeated from production to criticism-- Reddit can't get enough of genre authors' repetition of words like "balls" or "pausing".

In contrast, most of the essays I read and write repeat themselves plenty. One expects any words that the text formally defines to be exceptions to the "no repetition" rule-- obviously Testimonial Injustice will repeat the word "injustice", as well as "credibility excess", "epistemic", and "prejudice". But read enough about poetry, and you're bound to come across work that talks about "sound" ad nauseam, without explicit definition, where it would be absurd to change even one into "noise", "din", or "clamor". I just submitted an essay on language that used the word "tongue" 14 times in five pages, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat! A stability of word choice can imply a stability of meaning. What a low cost that is to convey information, especially if the reader can expect the inverse to be true!

Of course, the point is not that the Brandon Sanderson-touting masses simply could not comprehend the inscrutable ways of the keyword-loving academic. Academics also complain justifiably about dry, repetitive prose (or, on the flip side, Roland Barthes using "voluptuous" one too many times). And I think any high-school teacher would agree that keywords demand repetition, without it negating the underlying point: that their students need to stop saying the author "utilized" some rhetorical device every other sentence¹.

But I do claim that one vector of anti-intellectualism is the ideology of the thesaurus. The difference between Snape "saying" or "ejaculating" is (and I don't use this word as a snide modernist criticism, but as a neutral description) ornamental. In the context of an editor dutifully culling the population of "said", this decision is mostly about the aesthetic fork in the road between repetition and variegation. Of course the choice of synonym, once you've decided to use an ostentatious word, is communicative. But in circles centered around "the craft", the base choice to use a synonym or not is a grainy decision about the words' sonic qualities rather than a glassy one about their communicative ones.² In formal writing it's often the opposite-- the choice to double up on a word or not is about whether the instances are alike enough to merit the same label.

And ultimately, what's one of the most prominent reasons one might claim that forms outside the novel are "inaccessible"? Word choice, and specifically the reuse of keywords without a vernacular meaning when synonyms exist. The stock response to this complaint, which is true, is that writers encode words with meaning so they don't have to keep relitigating stock phrases. This is a known theodicy for jargon like "intersectionality", "ideology", and "epistemic".³

But a thoughtful response might be this: Why not use synonyms and litigate the differences outside the word boundary? Why introduce a "queered anarcha-feminist limen" when the student taking notes will likely write down "LGBTQ+", "women's rights", and "transitional space" anyway? Why say "epistemic" over and over when you could have said "knowledge-based", creating a dull drone that seems only to brag that the author has a new favorite word? The answer is that the text relies on a stability of meaning, within and across texts. But the ideology of the thesaurus claims instead that meaning is being obscured, out of love for form and sound-- and anyone with Merriam-Webster can prove it.