Thesauri are often pretty limited—dry books with dull synonyms. Philadelphia lawyer Peter E. Meltzer had enough of those limitations, of not finding the right word; the best word; the boldest, most imaginative word. So for a decade, he went on a lexicologist's odyssey and wrote The Thinker's Thesaurus for Marion Street Press, a niche publisher specializing in works for writers and journalists. For creating the most valuable new text for scribes and word lovers, Meltzer has been contacted by Microsoft Corporation to add the book to Microsoft Word. The book's also been selected as one of the American Booksellers Association's Book Sense picks for January 2006. A.D. Amorosi caught up with him for an e-mail interview.

City Paper: So what's a bankruptcy/creditors-rights lawyer like you doing in a nice place like the English language?

Peter Meltzer: My tongue-in-cheek—but not totally false—answer is that it's more interesting at cocktail parties to tell people I'm an author rather than a lawyer. After I became a lawyer, I wrote many briefs and law review articles. In the course of doing that, I always wanted to use the best possible word for each occasion. However, I found that when I consulted conventional thesauri, I was invariably disappointed by their mundane offerings, which were words I'd already considered and rejected before consulting the thesaurus. Once I concluded that the kind of thesaurus which would be truly of use to good writers did not exist, I had to create it.

CP: You mention you and your friends discussing the inadequacy of existing thesauri as the precursor to your attempt to create a better one. This sounds very dry—like that party Woody Allen jokes about, with people mispronouncing "didacticism" and "allegorical." What was this occasion?

PM: The occasion was a party for my wife. A bunch of us were sitting around playing [the board game] Balderdash, in which someone picks a card that has an unusual word on it. Everyone tries to make up a definition for that word. The object is to get as many people as possible to pick your "fake" definition, while the pickers are trying to guess the real definition. Someone pointed out that it would be great if there were a resource by which to actually find all the great words included in the game.

CP: "Sophisticated synonyms" you call them. Do you ever find yourself using words not in the current vernacular or ones over someone's head?

PM: It hasn't been a problem for me in my personal life because I have always bent over backwards to avoid using words in conversation that might not be generally known or that might come off as pompous even if the given word was the perfect word for the occasion. But I refuse to dumb down my vocabulary for fear that my reader will have a limited vocabulary.

CP: What were the criteria for including slang?

PM: Good question. I just felt that there weren't enough established standards regarding the use of slang words. It was too much "anything goes," which I didn't want. I wanted to play within the formal rules of the English language as much as possible. Having said that, from time to time, I violated my own rule anyway. For example: "intimidate (v.t.): Bogart [slang, after roles played by Humphrey Bogart]. Here are some tips to help avoid getting drawn into a road-rage situation. … Do not glare at other drivers, or try to 'Bogart'—i.e., intimidate them with scowls, frowns and rude gestures, such as giving the 'bird.' You have no way of knowing whether the other motorist you're making faces at is near the end of his rope on this particular day and just looking for someone to go off on." That's a quote from Eric Peters, "Dealing with 'Road Rage' Safely and Effectively," Consumers' Research Magazine, 5/1/2003.

CP: What trends or movements in language did you find where synonyms were concerned?

PM: One of the trends I noticed is how much narrower our collective vocabularies become from one generation to the next. There is a book written by John McWhorter which I talk about in the introduction called Doing Our Own Thing--The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care and its theme is how beautifully people (even comparatively uneducated people) used to write compared to how they do so today. I agree with that observation and my book is an attempt to help people buck that trend.