Using A Thesaurus

For nearly two years in my writing life, I thought that using a thesaurus meant your writing sounded better and more adult. This is exactly the sort of scene I came up with:
"She manipulated the garment in a cogitative mode.
‘Hmm,’ she vocalised. ‘This attire is verifiably marvellous. What is it constituted from?’
‘From the most meritorious velveteen,’ defined her interlocutor, simpering coincidentally.
‘Is it?’ iterated the party of the first part. ‘That’s felicitous.’
‘Additionally, this specified object has the property of being subdivided in terms of its defining mercantile characteristic, and can be taken possession of for the diminutive quantity of merely a half-dozen currency units,’ the retail employee informed.
‘Exoneration?’ supplicated the protagonist appropriately. The commercial tertiary sector worker eyeballed her perspicaciously.
‘I said it’s five ninety-nine. Do you want it or not?’"


Mine might even have been worse, as I used this technique mainly on poetry. I would write a line like "the red sun sank into the dark blue sea" and then translate it into: "The crimson orb was lowered beneath the indigo billows" (note how the passive voice creeps in).
The Onion had a great article about similar poetry; the poem was called “The Purple Lake of Desolation” and the headline was “Children of Divorce Twice as Likely to Write Bad Poetry.”

Comments

AYDIN ÖRSTAN said…
And you are not even a child of divorce!
Cindy said…
Gracious, that's horrible. (S)

I've found the same effect in my own writing, maybe without the overuse of a thesaurus though. Just trying too hard, and wanting people to think I'm clever. I don't think it worked!