[Review of Gage Canadian thesaurus]

In 1852, the publishing house Longman released a reference work whose aim was 'to supply, with respect to the English Language, a desideratum hitherto unsupplied in any language, namely, a collection of the words it contains and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a Dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express.' I speak, of course, of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases written by physician-librarian Peter Mark Roget. Roget's Thesaurus was sustained by the Roget family for three generations. In the 1930s, its popularity soared, as hordes of fanatic crossword puzzlers found treasured answers in Roget's storehouse of words. A quick perusal of Gage's pages reveals several Canadianisms. For example, the words fawn and flatter reveal the synonyms 'suck up to' and 'bootlick' respectively in Gage, but not in Roget. Other unique Canadian synonym pairings I spotted included angry-ticked off or teed off, as well as boisterous-slaphappy.