When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense…
call that the Ship of Thesaurus
Any educator who doesn’t feel this on a visceral level has never had to experience the psychic pain of reading the phrase “Unused York City.”
A lecturer at Middlesex University in 2014, Chris Sadler, coined the term “Rogetism” for these. Perhaps the best:
(“Roget’s Thesaurus’ is one of the most common thesauruses used in US schools, in case you don’t get the joke right off.”
(via sorchaivy)


