Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, January 17th, 2025. Today's poem is by Billy Collins, and it's called Thesaurus. And this is a fun one because it's not only a poem about words,

it's a poem about a book, chock full of words,

a book that specializes in words in a way that few other poems do.

There's a great image in the middle of the poem,

this kind of lexical family reunion in which

words are pictured standing around with their relatives, both near and distant.

But another reason I like this poem is because after that, the tone cools more than a little. There's some

appreciation of what a thesaurus is or represents, but then there's some caution, maybe even a

side-eye criticism of thesaurus's, if not what they stand for, at least how they're often used.

As a teacher, I have a sort of soft ban on the use of thesauruses in my classroom, largely because students, young students or inexperienced students, they tend to turn to a

the thoris for all the wrong reasons. They are looking for a word they don't know. And I always tell

them that that's the real problem. If you're going to a thesaurus to find a bigger and better

version of the word you do know.

You need to be really careful because what you're ultimately doing is trying to lay hands

on a word that you are unfamiliar with or less familiar with,

and that's going to lead to big, showy, bloated imprecision.

Because if you don't know the word,

then you don't know for sure that you're using the word correctly.

And as Collins, I think absolutely correctly states in this poem,

there's really no such thing as a synonym. There are words that are

close cousins, that are words that resemble each other. But the beauty of language is that no two words,

though they share this kinship, maybe even a strong kinship, no two words are

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