The Sunday paper’s Word Guy column started me musing about words in general and  the April 29 New Yorker essay by John McPhee (Draft No. 4) that works its way around, in a McPhee-like peregrination, to commending “le mot juste,” and the thrill writers feel when they find the exactly, precisely, inarguably very best word in meaning, connotation, and sound (extra points!) to express a particular thought. That article inspired me to put a “favorite word used today” widget at the bottom of my website home page.

McPhee doubts that a thesaurus will help much in extricating that perfect word from our farrago of a language. He prefers a dictionary, so he can delve into etymologies and associations, and is a fan of those paragraphs that shave the distinctions between, say, dark, dim, obscure, gloomy, and murky.

Nevertheless, Visual Thesaurus is a subscription site I use when the word I want is off napping somewhere in my brain. The definitions component of the site is weak, precisely because it doesn’t adequately explore shades of meaning. But it’s helpful in reminding me about extended word families, which helps me sneak up on a napping uncle and poke him awake.

Visual Thesaurus has other pleasures, and allows some lucky folks to have the job of developing arcane word lists (“Ten Words from the New York Times – July 3, 2013,” a list that included autocrat, throes, culminate, and intransigence; “‘Jabberwocky,’ vocabulary from the poem”; “100 SAT words beginning with ‘A’”; and the like). It has word games, a spelling bee, and VocabGrabber, which can create word clouds and perform other analyses.

I dropped the 36,000 words of my novel-in-progress into VocabGrabber and found I’ve used 2500 different words so far, 94 from the fields of social studies, 65 from arts and literature, 128 from science, and 13 from math (huh?). That doesn’t add up. “Misalign” turned up at the bottom of the list based on “familiarity,” and it occurs in the book’s first paragraph: “biding his time while the alcohol-soaked reception ratcheted forward on misaligned social wheels.” Interesting, since “ratcheted” is the word that’s received question marks. It’s the bedraggled old words at the top of the frequency list that concern me most, though. I know, “When in doubt . . .”

Lerner and Loewe have the last . . . well, you know.