Had this Book Club Associates' edition forwarded to me soon after its publication in 1973 when I was living in Scandinavia, short on Markka & pretending to be a budding author. It was an invaluable tool - to find that ultimate keyword your mind has let slip - and has continued to be every year since then although my oeuvre remains perilously slim!
A Thesaurus's role is to complement, not replace the inestimable Dictionary: as R.A. Dutch states in the preface (1962), "It furnishes no labels for 'speech level', for what is scholarly, literary or vulgar, or archaic and obsolete" (and certainly this Edition along with me is bordering on that last vestige of practical usefulness that was my ambition and is now for youthful aspiring writers). ( )

I got a personal message on Goodreads the other day by somebody spruiking his new book site. It was great, he said, you can chat to people about books on it. After making the obvious point that he was telling me that on a site where people chat about books, he enthusiastically assured me that if I just went and had a look, I'd see....

So I did. Book-talks.com You need a login to see chat rooms, but you can see books and their blurbs without that. I zeroed in on The Great Gatsby on account of how it's more or less my favourite book. And this is what I read:

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel composed by American creator F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the anecdotal towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the late spring of 1922. The story essentially concerns the youthful and baffling mogul Jay Gatsby and his eccentric energy and fixation on the excellent previous debutante Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby investigates topics of debauchery, vision, protection from change, social change and abundance, making a representation of the Roaring Twenties that has been depicted as a useful example in regards to the American Dream.

Something odd is going on here. It's either been written by a non-native person with a thesaurus...or an algorithm? I put a sentence into google and discovered the answer.

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. Many literary critics consider The Great Gatsby to be one of the greatest novels ever written.[1][2][3][4]

The story of the book primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession with the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval and excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary[a] tale regarding the American Dream.[5][6]

The blurb has been taken lock stock and barrel from wiki's The Great Gatsby entry and a thesaurus loving algorithm has changed some words to make it 'original'. The comparisons between the two are hilarious. It would make a nice lesson for school kids on understanding what a thesaurus is and the dangers of using it.

Sorry, I just don't get it, understand it, grasp it, make the connection, dig it, comprehend it.

The reason each word exists is that it is its own thing. By definition the thesaurus is telling you to do something wrong: to replace a word with something that isn't quite right.

I'm not going to say any more, but I DEMAND that you go here and watch/listen to The Thesaurus Song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHDn7_pmRug

It's brilliant, wonderful, fantastic, the best, fabulous....you get the idea. ( )

A desk without a good thesaurus is like a house without windows. ( )

1991, 10th impression