[Rollin' Rog]

I've been a subscriber to Visual Thesaurus for about a year now -- and have found it a lot of fun to play with >> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

But only recently have I become acquainted with VocabGrabber >>

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/

This is an absolutely amazing implementation of VT and I don't think you need to subscribe to use it.

Here's a tip: the instructions for implementing it as a Toolbar feature work fine in both Opera and Firefox, however when following their directions for IE8 it does not automatically select text from the page you are on.

Here you must drag and drop the address bar icon onto your Toolbar (not their drag and drop instruction) and then select "Properties" and change the url to read:

javascript:var _vgurl='http://www.visualthesaurus.com'; var s=document.createElement('script');s.src=_vgurl+'/vocabgrabber/bookmarklet.js';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s); void(0);

You will receive a "warning" prompt that there is no "engine" associated with the script -- just ignore it.

Once you have completed this any page you are on can be loaded automatically into the VocabGrabber and the results can be quite enriching.

The autograb does not always implement fully on some pages and you may see only a partial text listing. In these, mostly rare cases, you must manually select and paste the text you want.

For starters I would recommend some of Maureen Doud's columns

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/op...rssnyt&emc=rss

William Safire was, of course, a "wordsmith" in his own right