Thesaurus dot Com Got Dumbed Down

Just a disclaimer before you read on: although I call myself a writer, I’m not actually a writer. I’m a blogger. Which is a way for me to publish my guidance and opinion to a limited audience who may, someday, become a vast audience. But since blogging is a form of writing, I guess I do, in fact, write. And occasionally, I need assistance from thesaurus.com.

Yeah, I know, that’s where losers turn to when they don’t have an expansive vocabulary. But I work in advertising, so unless you work in digital advertising, where obfuscation is the name of the game (and they make up their words anyway), our vocabulary is limited. Because advertising is now all about Big Data and Infographics.

Headline schmedline.

Anyway, this is about going to thesaurus.com today to get a different word for ‘dichotomy’. And since I was out really late last night, I couldn’t come up with a good alternative. Hence my visit to that site.

thesaurus.JPG

Holy cow, I found that they’ve changed it up (Okay, my fault, it has been a month since I blogged and I’m now redeeming myself). And I don’t like the change. Who the heck wants to do all this visual tuning-in nonsense to get a word? So it starts out with Synonyms for Dummies and you can ramp it up to Full Literacy?

I was so taken aback that I didn’t realize at the top there was the “show me the old Thesaurus.com” link.

Instead, I did what any early adopter would do. I clicked on the Tell us what you think! link.

Guess what I clicked? Correct – thumbs-down. I took the survey (which for the record was more than a minute), and the last item was an open-ended “Tell us your thoughts on our new site”. So I did.

Here it is.

I guess this is the wave of the 'future' to make everything graphical. But when you've spent at least (we'd hope) 12 years in school, then another 4 or more, we're all pretty used to using words. So I'd think that for the next 20 years or so, we should have the 'old' thesaurus. Perhaps the generation that is now being created (I'm sure that's still going on and will continue long beyond the many iterations of thesaurus.com) that pictures will serve them just fine. Because they won't write or speak in full sentences anyway. And hieroglyphs will come back in style and be all the rage. Yep. I should be super old by then and as they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Then thesaurus.com can become a one-page site. With a picture or two. Awesome. I'm getting off track here, but I think you guys are probably pretty smart, since you still have all the words in there *somewhere* and know that I like words. Because I write. And I like to write. But sometimes when I've used a word seventeen times in my blog, and I'm ready to post and I realize, "oh, crap! I need to beef-up my vocabulary”, so I go to thesaurus.com and I get completely usable, awesome alternatives to my drab speech patterns. So I'd like to say thank you in advance for returning to - or perhaps giving me an alternative to - this really stupid idea to give me a graph of my word rather than a list of words. Okay. I'm done. I'm sure you'll take my advice. Now go fix it. Again, thanks.

And it only gets better. So I put dumbed down into thesaurus.com. Check it out.

dumbed.JPG

Then clicked on dictionary.com.

dumbed dictionary.JPG

I rest my case.