Never give me a Thesaurus.

I never use a thesaurus. I cannot have one in the house. My spouse already thinks I speak in a foreign tongue. I admit to using unusual words but not too often and not too weird, in my books. I am happy with eviscerated, mellifluous, penumbra, conurbation etc but think I am carrying things too far with Di-zygotic, Triskaidekaphobia, pellucid or Euclidean. Can you imagine how bad I would be with a thesaurus to hand. I suspect even bibliophiles would shudder and void into their undergarments were I to be given one.

Yet I hate avoiding good words both when writing and talking. Since the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe, before whom, English was little more than a pidgin language, it has grown and blossomed (with a great deal of influence from many writers) into the dominant language of the world. Shakespeare and his ilk had not the language in the burgeoning English, adapted from Anglo Saxon to say all that they wished to convey. So they garnered words and phrases from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German creating a new English vocabulary, one that would spread over the world.