The MagazineRoget for ModernsThe words of English get the Oxford treatment.Feb 1, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 19
• By EDWARD SHORT
 The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford Virginia Woolf once said that the word for writing should not be composition, which hardly gives an accurate idea of the stitching and unstitching that writing requires, but revision. Like Cardinal Newman and Winston Churchill, Woolf wrote standing up, so the onerousness of writing was something of which she was particularly conscious. But whether standing or sitting, all writers must not only choose but find their words, and that can be madly frustrating. Enter Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), the polymath behind the eponymous Thesaurus who, for generations, has come to the rescue of word-hunting writers. Born in Soho, London, Roget was the son of the Huguenot pastor of the French Protestant church on Little Deab Street. His mother was the sister of Samuel Romilly, the parliamentarian and law reformer, from whom he inherited his peculiarly methodical intelligence. After obtaining a medical degree at Edinburgh, Roget went on to distinguish himself in a number of different métiers before devoting himself to his Thesaurus. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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