Roget's thesaurus

I'm not unfamiliar with a dictionary or a thesaurus. In fact, as a kid in primary school, I used to flick through my father's copy of Chambers' 20th Century Dictionary. It got so well-worn that the pages were slowly coming apart. I've still got it somewhere in the house, though I'd need to search hard for it—I've got newer dictionaries now, like the Oxford, Collins and BBC ones. 

Heck, at one point in the 1980s, on a trip to the Merdeka team chess tournament in Kuala Lumpur with my chess friends, I even bought a ridiculously voluminous—and heavy—dictionary from the Popular Bookstore there. Mainly because it was cheap. Also mainly because one of my chess friends and I were urging each other to buy such a thick book. We struggled to carry our copies on the bus back home to Penang. That dictionary’s long gone, by the way. Took up too much space in the house, and though I loathed to part with it, I had little choice.

The thesaurus, on the other hand, was a different story. I only discovered its existence when I was in college. The moment I saw a copy of Roget's Pocket Thesaurus in a bookstore, I was smitten. Finally, a book that could provide me with synonyms and antonyms, expanding my vocabulary beyond my limited scope. I used it so much that the pages became well-leaved. And then, a little while later, I came across Roget's Thesaurus in Dictionary Form. No hesitation—I got myself a copy. I was used to the original format of the thesaurus, but I quickly realised that the dictionary form was even easier to use. No more flicking through the index and then jumping to the relevant category at the front of the book.

As time passed, Roget's Pocket Thesaurus was forgotten—misplaced, lost. I relied solely on the dictionary version to get by. But even that eventually fell into disuse. When the Internet came around in the '90s, online thesauruses became my go-to resource, and my physical copy was relegated to the cupboard.

Only two or three weeks ago, I finally brought it out from storage—all because someone passed me a copy of her Roget's Pocket Thesaurus! Putting the two copies side by side brought back such wonderful memories of using them. Those were the good old days...