According to Cosmopolitan Magazine, an unassailable authority on all questions of love and romance, the ability to finish your partner’s sentences is the number 10 sign that you have met your soulmate. Upon discovery of this groundbreaking theory, I examined my own relationship and asked myself: “What if my significant other not only completes my sentences, but revises and improves their content, thereby constantly contributing to my journey of intellectual growth and self actualization?” Luckily enough, the number 7 sign of soulmate status is “You challenge and constantly aim to improve one another”.
In the dark times before my relationship with Thesaurus.com, my academic writing was heavily dependent on the synonyms feature in Microsoft Word, where I would choose from a scant selection of three or four loosely fitting alternatives to replace words like “happy,” “for example,” “good,” or “things”. The remedy to my sad little lexicon of the time was not very effective, since all I did was substitute the basic words I was using with a repetitive collection of slightly less basic words. But alas, the era of Word synonyms came to an end, as all things are bound to do, and the reign of Google Docs began.
According to Plato, a guru almost as revered as Cosmopolitan, necessity is the mother of invention. Amazingly, the 2000-year old philosopher was able to postulate a perfect assessment of my actions when I found out that Google Docs, despite all its efficiency and universality, is utterly devoid of a synonyms feature. I decided, out of necessity, to find another source of sophisticated words, and on that fateful day I met Thesaurus.com.
Initially, the appearance of Thesaurus.com in my life was like a brilliant light turned on in a dark room. The abundance of possibilities evoked a feeling which I imagined to be similar to that of a foreigner in a Safeway cereal aisle for the first time. I immediately bookmarked my new companion on my computer, in order to always have quick access to his comforting and refined presence. As with any committed relationship, I found a special level of satisfaction in knowing (or foolishly assuming) that Thesaurus.com was mine and mine exclusively, that our relationship was unique and personal, and that none of the other plebs at my school could even begin to think to access my dear Thesaurus.com. Little did I know, I had a big (or tremendous, colossal, gigantic) storm coming.
Cosmopolitan warns that the #5 sign your relationship is disintegrating is when both you and your partner become interested in other people. In high school, I began to read literature besides the middle school classic The Clique and the action packed Percy Jackson series, (neither of which gleam with high quality writing), thereby unknowingly found a new source to enrich my own vocabulary. At around the same time, my friends and I began peer editing each other’s essays, an ostensibly innocuous and even valuable custom that nevertheless would lead to my disillusionment and break up with Thesaurus.com.
I will never forget the fateful night when my friend sent me her paper on the role of religion in Crime and Punishment to ask for my suggestions on how to perfect it. I skimmed it inattentively at first, but as the essay progressed, I began to look closely, feeling a strange familiarity in my friend’s words. I read frantically, becoming more and more confident in my suspicions with each SAT vocab word packed sentence. For every ornate, extravagant word in her essay, I could guess the primitive inferior that was cruelly replaced. My heart hurt as I pictured my classmate spending time consulting Thesaurus.com– a ritual I thought was uniquely and entirely mine. But besides the shock and sadness of being cheated on, I noticed the overall fakeness and awkwardness of the essay. After the initial reveling in the shortcomings of my competitor, a.k.a., The Other Woman, I began to question the reason for the gracelessness of a seemingly articulate and even verbose essay.
As I reread it a few times, I realized the essay lacked any personal voice. It was formulaic, devoid of any stylistic individuality, and at times even hard to understand. I looked over some of my own “best” papers and to my disappointment, saw the same thing. Thesaurus.com may be full of sophisticated words, but he is only a machine, incapable of human passion and zeal and emotion– the greatest contributors to brilliant writing. Unlike humans, he is not capable of understanding context, so his words shine with impressive length and individual glory, but they do not always fit in the complex puzzle of an essay or a narrative, where sometimes, the short, simple word is perfect. As I clicked unfavorite on the Thesaurus.com tab on my computer, I remembered Cosmopolitan’s #4 thing to do when coming out of a relationship: reconnect with who you are outside the influence of your ex. With this sage advice in mind, I began a new chapter in my writing life– the era of self invention and linguistic independence. Don’t worry though, Thesaurus.com still gets the occasional booty call.
