He was aloof, humorless and self-absorbed, and so tamped down that he seems to have been incapable of strong feeling. He led an extremely interesting life without being very interesting himself. We are always hearing how Roget felt that his heart pounded or his jaw dropped and there are passages of dialogue that, in the absence of notes, one can’t help suspect of being partly invented.īut this is an almost forgivable lapse, because Roget is a hard subject to warm to. If his writing has a fault, it’s a tendency toward mind reading and novelization. Kendall’s account of this unusual man is very readable and shows no signs of excessive reliance on the thesaurus. Roget began it when he was 26, then put it aside until he had retired from science and was eager to get his name before the public again.
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The thesaurus or to give it its full title, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition was almost an afterthought.
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He was also one of the first to observe that the retina sees a series of still images as a continuous picture a discovery that led to the invention of the zoetrope, and eventually to motion pictures. He invented the log-log scale for the slide rule, wrote an influential book on natural history and contributed numerous articles to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He trained as a doctor, and though his poor social skills kept him from being much of a clinician, he was greatly in demand as a lecturer in anatomy and physiology.
Whatever else he was, Roget was immensely accomplished, even for an age when polymaths were far more common than they are now. Kendall argues, but simply an involuntary part of who he was. It seems likely, in other words, that his passion for lists for order and for categories was not so much a heroic defense mechanism, as Mr. At an early age Roget began making lists of deaths, of events, of interesting words and as he grew older, he also classified his experience according to an odd binary scheme, so that people, for example, were either “ordinary” or “peculiar,” and landscapes were “beautiful” or “not beautiful.” He counted all the steps he took during the day, had a fetish about cleanliness and was socially inept, failing to pick up obvious emotional clues.Īt the very least he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, but some of his behaviors also suggest that, were his condition diagnosed today, he might be classified as someone with high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome.
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