“Brotherly” and “fraternal,” for instance. Or “sis-
terly” and “sororal.” ;ey may correspond well
enough in meaning, but that should not imply
that one can always be substituted for another.
Consulting a thesaurus to ;nd these closely relat-
ed sets of words is only the ;rst step for a writer
looking for le mot juste: the peculiar individuality
of each would-be synonym must then be care-
fully judged. Mark Twain knew the perils of rely-
ing on the family resemblance of words: “Use the
right word,” he wrote, “not its second cousin.”
No matter how tempting the metaphor,
though, words are not people. We cannot run ge-
netic tests on them to determine their degrees of
kinship, and a thesaurus is not a pedigree chart.
We can, nonetheless, look to it as a guidebook
to help us travel around the semantic space of
our shared lexicon, grasping both the similarities
that bond words together and the nuances that
di;erentiate them.
