Consider the thesaurus
The thesaurus sucks. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!).
Consider the thesaurus
Dictionary dump (unformatted): a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s. aardvark : South African “earth pig” aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up
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Imagine a “situational thesaurus.” Instead of just unpacking related words, you unpack all the contexts that a word can apply. Examples:
addle — social media, work, disinformation (dilution from quantity)
faustian — VR / AGI or e/acc, finance, cloning, influencers, adderall, steroids
platonic — solids, relationships, education, leisure, cognition
They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)
Lydia Chilton • How a Stylistic, Machine-Generated Thesaurus Impacts a Writer’s Process
The better your vocabulary, the more things you can name, the richer your base of raw materials to hang new ideas and experiences on.
Neil Kakkar • Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model
