OK, here’s a preamble. Words themselves are symbols, and are made up of smaller discrete symbols. These symbols have meaning and are interpreted by our brains as we “read” them. You are doing this now. (Whoopee, the reader says.) If the words fall within our “memory” we “understand” the meaning to a reasonable approximation of the writer’s intent, and we can refine this understanding further by looking at the context of the word within a sentence, a paragraph or even more. All of this almost-instant understanding can be verified by checking individual words in a dictionary, although English provides so many alternatives that even simple words can blur somewhat and will require some guesswork. Now imagine if the writer further confused us all by using a thesaurus, a device by which the writer can appear more studiously wordy and worthy than the reader. Great. We have obfuscated ourselves into a hole (but not a whole).

Now amplify the simple thesaurus with visuwords, a cool tool that can search, show and zoom on words and their connections with related words. Go on, try it. Waste some more time on the net and find some fascinating word associations in the process. Great. Don’t forget to check out Princeton’s WordNet link on the same site.