Roget gets on-message to girl power, Prozac and dangly bits

ALL HUMAN life is there, in 990 categories, compartments, divisions, brackets, pigeon-holes. A new edition of Roget's Thesaurus, the first for 11 years, is published this week, a splendid hybrid of late 20th century English and mid-19th century taxonomy. When Peter Mark Roget, the son of a Swiss Lutheran preacher and a French Huguenot, compiled his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852, it was not only a landmark in linguistic scholarship, but also the most eloquent testimony to obsessive compulsive behaviour the world had ever seen.

In an era when natural scientists wanted to classify everything, Roget performed the task for words, from Class 1: "Abstract relations" to Class 6: "Emotion, religion and morality", with each class divided and subdivided as necessary. In Roget's first edition, there were 15,000 words. The new edition, edited by Betty Kirkpatrick, has more than a quarter of a million, all finding their rightful places in Roget's original scheme.

Dangly bits are there too, in 167 Propagation, under section 8 Causation, of Class 1 Abstract Relations, between rocks (sl) and lunch-box (inf). And if you fail to be on message about the millennium bug, girl power, or are even just having a bad hair day and driven to road rage and a dose of Prozac, you will find them all in the new edition too.

But what help can Roget provide for describing someone who would take on such a colossal task as categorising the English language? Was its originator a boring person, bromide, anorak, trainspotter? Or worse, a saddo (sl), dweeb (sl), geek (sl), dryasdust, buttonholer, killjoy? No, we find him best described under Personal emotion, section 862 Fastidious- ness. Perfectionist, idealist, purist, precisian, pedant, nitpicker, stickler he must have been, but as usual, Roget's Thesaurus provides us with the mot juste: Peter Mark Roget must have been the world's greatest fussbudget.

Roget's Thesaurus of English words and phrases, Penguin Books pounds 14.99.