This page has five short sections. Today, you can go into any book store and choose from countless books and software programs dedicated to improving your grammar, spelling, and writing style. However, Peter Roget's 1852 Thesaurus is considered the pioneer of modern thesauruses of synonyms and antonyms. When you look up a word in any good dictionary, such as the Oxford or Merriam-Webster , what you get is one kind of meaning. However, as all good writers know, words and phrases reflect the intellectual-emotional duality of the human mind.
Words actually convey two distinctly different kinds of meaning simultaneously .
Words such as celebration, springtime, and kiss arouse unique assemblages of positive emotional connotations. Words such as homeless, cancer, and rape summon clouds of negative emotional connotations. Many words and phrases, such as bullfight , call up mixed positive and negative connotations. Today's dictionaries and thesauruses are completely devoid of connotative meaning. However, as you will see at this Web site, new emotional language reference products will soon change the world of language reference.