A Lexigraphical Lament about Probationer Prosody

All scribes utilize lexicons.  Roget's regnant tome monopolizes the matriculant market.  Neophytes congregate in monograph outlets to procure a reprint.  They disembark at their domicile and allocate Peter Roget's linguistical treatise a bearing on a transversal above their desktop computer.  There it hunkers until a pedagogue implores them to formulate a polemic.  Then the prentice wordsmith extracts it.  The pupil employs it to ameliorate his pedestrian prose.  With hubris he asseverates the eminence of his phraseological aptitude:

"My profiency with palaver is unparalleled.  Scrutinize my incomparable prose if you don't accredit me!"

The ensuing evening his educator ensconces himself at his trestle to assess his august pupil's critique.   After he appraises it he thrusts his extremities on his coutenance.  He again cognizes that graduands should not be sanctioned to retain Roget's opus because proprietorship of aforementioned reprehensible receptacle of lexical surrogates elicits maximal keening from all preceptors. 

"Why!" the mentor declaims at his articulatory apex.  "Why must charges importune their prose with exorbitant diction?"

Comments

[badger]

I tell my students if they feel they must use a thesaurus, then please use Roget's, and not Bill Gates's.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm not sure Roget's is an improvement. That's what I used to compose this. Word's certainly worse, but Roget isn't good. My complaints, I realize, aren't original. But I've never graded this many essays in so short a period before, so they seem necessary.

Also, by popular request this has now been cross-posted to the Valve.

Finally, I should add that I don't feel like I wrote the above so much as crafted it. Sure, I chose the words, but I was looking for oddity, alliteration and assonance, all of which is easier to find with a thesaurus than without. I only mention that because what I had that kid proclaim cracks me up in ways your own jokes shouldn't:

"Scrutinize my incomparable prose if you don't accredit me!"

That slays me. I was just replacin' words. But damn that makes me laugh.

[badger]

Well, you certainly couldn't have composed it with Word. 'Cause the choices just aren't so pretty-n-fancy.

[The Little Womedievalist]

That's it, Ceph, you've now officially written the most beautiful thing I've ever read. I stand, in my stylish yet affordable socks, completely amazed.

[Liz]

So dude, is this what our essays have driven you to?

[Adam Kotsko]

I read a scholarly book, of roughly 150 pages, which was like that the whole way through. The same problems afflicted him as afflict beleaguered undergrad thesaurophiles -- mainly a complete lack of any concept of the different shades of meaning and semantic range of any given "fancy" word, leading to a haze of inexactitude, hovering over every page like poison gas. It convinced me that that particular press does not employ editors at any level.

[Mike Schwartz]

The deleterious effects of exploiting a thesaurus.

Is it ironic, pathetic, or both that I had to use a dictionary to read Scott's post?

[Alex Leibowitz]

Is that from Joyce?

[Alex Leibowitz]

Is that from Joyce?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

No, it isn't.

But it could be.

[sunship]

You'll love this webcomic then:

http://xkcd.com/c116.html

or

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/city.jpg

[David Moles]

It vexes me in the extreme that I encountered no obstacle in assimilating this disquisition.

(Maybe it would take undergraduate grammar and logic to bring home the full horror.)