Emotional Thesaurus

Also Known As:

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

What Is It? The Emotional Thesaurus is a special type of thesaurus that provides lists of emotional synonyms, which are called connonyms. For example, the words flamingo and Art Deco are connonyms because they both tap into the same combination of underlying emotions, namely, a combination of amusement and delight.

How Would I Use It? You would use it much the way you use a standard thesaurus. The difference is that you would use an Emotional Thesaurus when you're looking for words that evoke similar emotions, rather than words that have similar literal meanings. The Emotional Thesaurus provides highly accurate figures of speech (similes and metaphors) by grouping together words that have completely different dictionary (objective) meanings, but much in common emotionally.

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DETAILED DESCRIPTION AND IMAGES

With an ordinary thesaurus, you look up a word and you get a list of synonyms—words that have similar objective meanings. For example, if you were to look up the word "accident," in a thesaurus, you'd find synonyms such as "crash," "mishap," and "pile-up."

An Emotional Thesaurus is a book (or database) of "connonyms", or emotional synonyms.

The Emotional Thesaurus is to emotional meaning what the thesaurus is to rational meaning. The Emotional Thesaurus will have the same look and feel as a thesaurus, its denotative cousin.

Connonyms, unlike synonyms, have no objective or logical relationship to the looked-up word. However, they have similar underlying emotional meanings. They evoke similar emotions. Below are a few examples, drawn from our test databases.

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When you look up the word "accident" in an Emotional Thesaurus, you find completely unrelated words such as "purse snatcher" and "brown snake." These words are connonyms, not synonyms. They evoke the same combination of underlying emotions as the word "accident," namely alarm and panic. The same applies to all of the other words you see grouped on the list below. In a full-length Emotional Thesaurus, you will actually get a list of 20, 30, 40 or more connonyms for each word you look up, not just the 2 or 3 provided in this abridged example.

accident n. purse snatcher, brown snake (Alarm and Panic)

bald eagle n. grand piano, Jupiter (Elation and Exuberance)

Bart Simpson n. practical joker, April Fool’s Day (Amusement and Hilarity)

black eye n. adult bookstore, disfigurement, crabs, dwarf, ringworm (Embarrassment and Stigma)

blind date n. movie, hickey, bingo, alien (science fiction) (Amusement and Excitement)

fireplace n. cinnamon (the color), Judy (name of person), potpourri (Comfort and Cheerfulness)

guide dog n. Good Friday, the pill (Comfort and Gladness)

hope v. meet, see, find, come round (visit) (Delight and Gladness)

hypnotist n. Oprah Winfrey, divination, Bill Clinton (Admiration and Amusement)

lavender (perfume) n. Megan (name of person); pond lily (Delight and Fondness)

leukemia n. STD, pain (Anxiety and Dread)

pit bull terrier n. paranoia, nightmare (Anxiety and Panic)

junk shop n. flamingo, polka dots, Art Deco (Amusement and Delight)

rejection slip n. Alzheimer’s disease, Dear Jane letter, unemployment (Bitterness and Resentment)

selfishness n. prude, evangelist, infection, mistake, loudmouth (Annoyance and Irritation)

smile n. light, day, sun (Cheerfulness and Joy)

squeegee kid n. cult, escort service (Disrepute and Stigma)

Volkswagen Beetle n. pumpkin, tie-dye, record/CD (Amusement and Cheerfulness)

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In the above examples, the layout of an Emotional Thesaurus is much like an ordinary thesaurus, except that the list of words following each "looked-up" word (in bold face) is a list of connonyms instead of synonyms.

How would a person use an Emotional Thesaurus? Well, suppose you were writing a short story or a television script. And suppose one of the settings is a junk shop. Without having to rack your brain for words that would evoke the atmosphere of a junk shop, you would simply look up "junk shop" in the Emotional Thesaurus. There, you would find connonyms such as polka dot, Art Deco, and flamingo. So, in describing your fictional junk shop, you could paint a word picture of a display-window featuring a red and white polka dot dress, a forest green Art Deco lamp, and a pink plastic flamingo. In so doing, you would create an atmosphere of amusement and delight which your audience would find emotionally accurate and satisfying for a junk shop setting—without understanding exactly why.

Here's an example of how the Emotional Thesaurus will be very useful to people in advertising and marketing. Suppose you are assigned to come up with a promotional campaign to sell the Volkswagen Beetle. You turn to the Emotional Thesaurus and look up "Volkswagen Beetle."

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Before continuing with this example, you may wonder why you will be able to find "Volkswagen Beetle" in the Emotional Thesaurus in the first place. "Volkswagen Beetle" is a proper noun. Many proper nouns get to be proper nouns because of their emotional or connotative significance. That is, we formally name important things, including each other, our pets, geographical locations, and products, because they are important to us. And it's for this reason that connotative language reference products such as the Emotional Dictionary and Emotional Thesaurus will contain tens of thousands of names of people, objects, and places, together with their complete emotional profiles. Here are some examples:

•   Business leaders, major corporations, and well-known products
•   Politicians and related icons
•   Athletes, teams, and sports icons
•   Artists and art works
•   Writers, book titles, and characters
•   Musicians, song titles, and album titles
•   Film titles, actors, actresses, and characters from the movies
•   Television shows, actors, actresses, and characters from TV
•   Pop culture icons such as fads, games, comics, and characters

You will find only a few of these kinds of proper nouns in an ordinary dictionary. Nevertheless, such proper nouns have enormous emotional resonance throughout society. That’s why you will find these words, and the emotional connotations they evoke, in connotative language products.

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Returning to the Volkswagen Beetle example, the Emotional Thesaurus provides several connonyms, or emotional synonyms, for Volkswagen Beetle, including "pumpkin", "record", and "tie-dye." Here is an example of how the software could easily provide filtering capabilities.

(A full-length Emotional Thesaurus will provide 30 or 40 such connonyms). All of these connonyms have the same underlying emotions in common. So an advertising or promotional campaign might consist of forming affiliations or partnerships between record stores and Volkswagen Beetle dealerships.

Alternatively, since advertisements tend to tell stories, a VW advertisement could well be a variation of the Cinderella story, in which the pumpkin turns into a Volkswagen Beetle instead of a horse-drawn coach. Because people unknowingly relate pumpkins and Volkswagen Beetles with the same underlying emotional connotations (amusement and cheerfulness), they would likely respond very positively to such an ad, but they would not know exactly why.

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The software version of the Emotional Thesaurus will function in two modes: "Look-up" mode, and "Look-for" mode. The above examples are in "Look-up" mode.

Now here are some examples of "Look-for" mode, the reverse of "Look-up" mode. In "Look for" mode, the user first selects an emotion or combination of emotions of interest. The software then "looks for" and finds connonyms that match the emotional atmosphere desired.

For example, in the first entry below, the user has requested nouns having connotations of both agony and torment. The Emotional Thesaurus has responded with "ripper" and "gang rape." Again, these are abridged examples; a full-length Emotional Thesaurus would provide dozens of matching words and phrases.

Agony and Torment (nouns):
ripper (murderer), gang rape

Annoyance and Offense (nouns, verbs):
(nouns) jerk, cheap shot, prick, (verb) leer at

Delight and Excitement (nouns):
Parisian, the occult

Desperation and Worry (nouns):  
tracks (needle marks), unemployment, impotence

Euphoria and Pleasure, filtered for "time" (nouns):
summer, long weekend

Euphoria and Excitement, filtered for "place" (nouns):
Rio de Janeiro, Walt Disney World

Delight, filtered for "taste" (nouns):
peanut butter, cotton candy, ice cream, root beer, pizza, French pastry, eggs Benedict

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The last three entries in the above list show how the user can even use filters, provided in the software, to limit the search to connonyms only of a certain type. This screen shot indicates how:

The above entry shows that the user has selected the emotion "delight", while filtering for the physical sense of "taste". The Emotional Thesaurus responds with peanut butter, cotton candy, ice cream, root beer, pizza, French pastry, and eggs benedict. These words are not related as synonyms, but they all evoke both "delight" and a sense of "taste." They are connotative synonyms, or connonyms.

There will be literally no practical limits on the number of different connonym lists the Emotional Thesaurus will be able to provide a writer—hundreds of millions of such lists.

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Because of their metaphorical qualities, connonyms—readily available in the Emotional Thesaurus—will be of greatest interest to creative writers, aspiring creative writers, and students of creative writing, who number in the millions in North America. After all, interesting, dramatic, and effective literary symbolism, especially metaphor, is what separates good writing from mediocre writing.

The Emotional Thesaurus will take advantage of the combinatorial nature of language to provide the user with easy access to an infinite number of compelling and completely original metaphors. Other users of the Connosaurus will include non-fiction writers who seek to bring their written work to life: journalists, critics, columnists, and commentators, and people employed in the creative side of marketing and advertising.

To summarize, when we are dissatisfied with a word we have in mind to put across an objective concept or idea, we use a thesaurus to help us solve this problem by providing lists of words having similar objective meanings.

Similarly, when we are dissatisfied with the feeling, mood, or emotion we wish to communicate in a message, we will be able to turn to the Emotional Thesaurus for help in solving this problem by providing lists of words and phrases that evoke the emotions we want our reader or audience to feel.