Is The Thesaurus A Dinosaur?

My intention is not to ridicule other people's stupidity. Taken out of my own knowledge-sphere, I have said and done many stupid things myself. Anyone who witnessed my lone attempt at fishing can attest to that fact and is free to write up all the gory details (the only thing I hooked was the wooden dock I stood upon, which wouldn't be all that embarrassing, except for the few seconds when I excitedly thought I had hooked a trophy fish), in celebration of our own common stupidities. So, just a couple of near priceless moments from the last two days in the bookstore world: A customer came in today looking for "Homer's Odyssey. I'm not sure who the author is." Fine, you could say the world at large has been debating just who the author of "Homer's Odyssey" is for a few thousand years. And you could also say maybe the customer wasn't sure which translation (admittedly a rather significant issue) was needed. Still, for us bookstore nerds, it was quite amusing.

Thoroughly amusing was yesterday's customer who stumped about five employees at once when he/she, out of the blue and with no context said, "It's like a dinosaur but with a 't.'" Um, "Tyrannosaurus Rex?" "No!" The customer looked frustrated, like the word she/he couldn't think of was right there, but somehow out of reach. We all looked around, kind of clueless, hoping maybe the customer would start acting out the book he/she wanted via Charades or something. I was just about to say, "Pterodactyl?" when one of my co-workers, the wise one, said, "Thesaurus?" "That's it!" The customer lit up. Wise co-worker, feeling pretty proud, and rightly so, led the customer to the shelf of thesauri, which, incidentally, is very close to where we shelve the dinosaur books.

Got me thinking. When was the last time I used a thesaurus? Years, if not decades, I bet. Making full use of my hard-earned poetic license, which doesn't even get me $.10 off a cup of coffeee, I usually just make a word up when I can't think of the one I need. And with built-in thesauri on computers, it's a wonder people still print the books, let alone buy them and use them. So who knows, maybe the thesaurus and the dinosaur have a lot more in common than that "saur."