The creator of the world’s first thesaurus Peter Roget has made his first public appearance in over a century to demand that DC retire the word “crisis”.
Although he died in 1869, the 19th century natural theologian recently emerged from his grave in
Surprisingly, since his return Roget has failed to comment on the huge advancements in the fields of science and technology since his death or the widespread social change in his homeland of
Instead, Roget chose to spend his first press conference in 167 years criticizing DC comics, a small-scale publisher of juvenile literature called “comic books”, for their rampant overuse of the word “crisis”.
“I haven’t seen the overuse of a single word this bad since the 15th century when people couldn’t get over the word ‘witch’,” Roget stated. “But at least those people had out-of-control religious zealotism to justify their lack of grammatical imagination. All DC do is print crap about superheroes.”
DC products with the word ‘Crisis’ in their title includes “Crisis on Multiple Earths”, “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, “Identity Crisis”, “Countdown to Infinite Crisis”, “Infinite Crisis”, “Final Crisis” and next summer’s “Indefinite Crisis of Infinite Crisis…Crisis”.
“At this point I’m just embarrassed for them. Seriously, when I first heard about ‘Infinite Crisis’ I rolled my eyes so hard they literally fell out of my decaying sockets,” Roget said.
“I strongly recommend that they pick up a copy of ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’ immediately. I still earn money off that thing don’t I?”
But Roget believes that the situation is salvageable, offering a number of new suggestions for DC’s next summer crossover in which worlds will probably die and most likely nothing will ever be the same again.
“Battle, big trouble, catastrophe, climacteric, climax, confrontation, contest, contingency, critical juncture, crunch, crux, culmination, deadlock, dilemma, dire straits, disaster, dispute, emergency, encounter, entanglement, exigency, extremity, fight, imbroglio, impasse, incident, juncture, mess, pickle, pinch, pivotal point, plight, predicament, pressure, problem, puzzle, quandary, showdown, situation, state, stew, strait, strife, trauma, trial, trouble and turning point: all of these actually mean almost the same thing as crisis,” Roget said. ”I’m quite partial to ‘Imbroglio on Infinite Earths’ myself.”
However, DC’s misuse of the word “crisis” wasn’t Roget’s only issue with the publishing company.
“I hate to go all grammar nazi on you people,” Roget said, illustrating his increasingly familiarity with 21st century slang, “but the word ‘bat’ should only be used as a noun or a verb. It is not an adjective. I repeat: not an adjective!”
While DC haven’t directly responded to Roget’s comments, editor in chief Dan Didio expressed surprise that Roget hadn’t become a troubled anti-hero in the wake of his poorly explained, physics defying resurrection.