![]() But perhaps the worst experience of Roget’s young life was having a grieving uncle slash his own throat and bleed to death right in the middle of a conversation they were having. His sister suffered from depression and nervous breakdowns. His mother became psychotic after his father died. His grandmother was a lifelong depressive and possibly a schizophrenic. Worse, some of his loved ones were more than a little dysfunctional, filling his life with instability, insanity, and tragedy. The young Roget was phobic about dirt and easily upset by a world he saw as random, messy, unpredictable, and disorderly. Before age 8, he had already filled notebooks with lists of words grouped by categories: for example, all the animals he could think of, all the parts of the body, and even “Things Found in the Garden.” He recorded, for example, the total number of stair steps he climbed up each day, and kept a separate count of the steps he went down. ![]() But in the late eighteenth century, the London-born son of a clergyman had to find his own way to cope: He obsessively counted things and made lists. In our time he would probably be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or perhaps classified as having high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome, and if he’d been born in the twenty-first century, professional help could have been sought. ![]() ![]() Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) was an unusual kid. It gave us a book that is of great use, utility, value, help, worth, and functionality. Once there was a man, a biographer noted, “more interested in words than people.” That turned out to be a great thing for BRI writers and other wordsmiths. The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader ![]()
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