David Clemens, a professor at Monterey Peninsula College, wrote in to comment on the recent discussion on Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus:

Hi, Evan,

The Roget’s synonyms for “liberal” and “conservative” reveal a sloppy methodology.

Dictionaries and thesauri are either “descriptive” (telling how a word IS being used) or “prescriptive” (telling how a word SHOULD be used).

The good Dr. Kipfer seems to have adopted a “descriptive” approach, simply creating a somewhat incoherent laundry list of associated words based on what she thinks people mean by them. Her synonyms for “liberal” and “conservative” probably derive from how people use them . . . on her hallway at Greenwich University. The result is that we can now say that liberals, who favor ecological and energy conservation, are “obstructionist, bitter-ender rednecks.”

The semanticist S. I. Hayakawa famously declared that no words are truly synonymous. (He actually said that the only synonymous words are “furz” and “gorse,” two names for a kind of grass—he was being funny, but then he was Canadian, eh?)

I thought I would generate an alternate list of descriptive synonyms based on my own experience:

conservative: rational, well-mannered, respectful, protective, sober, modest, patient, judicious, moral, pious, patriotic, virtuous, polite, gentlemanly or ladylike.

liberal: relativistic, tribal, hyperbolic, ends justify the means, fearful, authoritarian, do-gooder, self-righteous, utopian, dogmatic, patronizing, licentious, Orwellian.

As Glenn would say, heh.

Dave