A Writer’s In-Joke

Mark Anderson of Andertoons does a pretty good job of creating cartoons with an intellectual bent (as opposed to, say, scatological), and he even sells them for use in business and school presentations and the like. Check out his website.

Anyway, maybe today’s comic has two points. Do you get them both?

I’m pretty sure everybody can get the obvious joke; P.M. Roget wrote the Thesaurus, used by generations of writers to make their writing more lively, hence the list of synonyms for “peace.”

The second punchline isn’t exactly funny, perhaps. I haven’t opened my copy of his actual book for years. It’s too easy to go online, including here. And here. And here. And here. Where, ahem, I can also find Roget’s version.  Not to mention typing “synonym for [word]” in the address line of my browser.

So it’s a fitting epitaph, eh?