Duncan at Parrot Check directed me to a post on Preemptive Karma dissecting my earlier comments on Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD. I know I’m going against recent advice by engaging a critic in debate, but isn’t that what separates the blogosphere from the one-way megaphone of the establishment media. If a criticism is written that’s worthy of a response, why not engage?

Kevin at Preemptive Karma makes some very good points, and I’m inclined to agree with him. The problem is, he’s arguing against a point I didn’t make. I was discussing the impression left by a set of words, not the precise definitions of the words in the set. To make that point, I wrote:

If you didn’t know what the words meant, how would these Roget’s entries mold your perception of each word?

Try it out, do a simple word association game. Go back and look at the synonyms listed for the word liberal. Do the entries for the word liberal evoke positive feelings about that word? Now look at the list for conservative. How do those synonyms make you perceive the word conservative?

Kevin also takes issue with the fact that my comparison that mixes political and non-political words:

[T]hose synonyms were improperly compared to “conservative” by Evan and those rightwing blogs who referenced his story.

So then when we take another look at Evan’s compilation of synonyms for “liberal” we see that many of them don’t even belong there!

Again, no dispute there. I guess my disclaimer might have been easy to miss, considering the font size was exactly the same as the rest of the post:

Obviously, the terms liberal and conservative have meanings beyond the political. Still, from the inclusion of the word left in the liberal entry, we can tell that politics was at least considered by the editor when compiling these entries.

Kevin may feel I’m comparing apples and oranges; I’m actually comparing two different bushels. Dump all the liberal synonyms in one pile, all the ones for conservative in another. Compare the two. Which is rendered more favorably?

This is just simple deconstruction. I learned it in college.