"Words, words, words!" quoth Hamlet

         

"What do you read, my lord?"

"Words, words, words."

                           ~~~ Hamlet

Avi recently wrote about Monologophobia:

A 150th anniversary edition of Roget’s Thesaurus has recently been published.  Who was Peter Mark Roget?  He was an important 19th century English physician, mathematician, inventor of a prototype for the motion-picture film camera, creator of a pocket chessboard, and an expert on bees.  But perhaps he also suffered from "monologophobia" — which, I recently learned means an obsessive fear of using the same word twice.  Roget — for the first edition of the book — coined the word Thesaurus, apparently taking it from the Greek word for "treasure house."

Monologophobia, huh?  Maybe I have a touch of it, too.  By the way, this version of the book was published in 2006.  I don't call 2006 "recent," but okay.  I think Amazon has a math problem.  Amazon seems to think Roget's Thesaurus was originally published on January 1, 1746.  Wait a minute, Amazon!  I have helpfully highlighted in yellow the words above, that Roget lived in the 19th century.  Wikipedia says he lived from January 18, 1779 to September 12, 1869.  It would be very difficult to publish something decades before you were born.

Learn more about Roget in this Smithsonian Magazine article from last year.  Before he wrote a thesaurus, Roget had to escape Napoleon’s dragnet.  At the dawn of the 19th century, the young Brit got caught in an international crisis while touring Europe.

By the way, I know the word quoth is archaic, okay?  It means "said."  I remember that in school I had to read "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe.  I especially remember these two widely separated lines:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary ... 

Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

That second line simply means that the raven SAID "Nevermore."  In the title of this post of mine, Hamlet does the saying.