Howdy folks, Glen Blamstead here. I bought a thesaurus last week. Got it home, cracked the cover, and every single page was blank. Now I don't know what to say. I got no words. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Naught. Well — apparently I do have a few, but that's not the point.
The point is I drove all the way to Cambridge to buy this book. Cambridge, Minnesota, that is, not the fancy one across the pond. My wife had asked me to run in and get a birthday card for her sister and a bag of that flavored coffee she likes — hazelnut, or maybe it's hazelnut adjacent, I don't know, I'm not a coffee scientist. On the way out of the store I saw a used-book bin. Two dollars a book. Right on top was a thesaurus. And I thought, well now Glen, that's the kind of thing a fella should have in the truck. Impress the crew with a word like "resplendent" now and again. Sound smart when a customer asks about roof pitch.
The Ride Home
I was so excited I opened it right there in the parking lot. Flipped to the middle. Blank. Flipped to the end. Blank. Flipped to the front. Blank, blank, blank, and one page that said "THESAURUS" in nice gold letters and nothing else. Somebody had returned an entire book of nothing, and the store had priced it fair. Two whole dollars for a book that said absolutely diddly.
I sat there in the truck for a minute trying to figure out if this was some kind of art. My cousin's kid went to art school for a while and told me about a fella who taped a banana to a wall and sold it for a bunch of money. I thought maybe the blank thesaurus was like the banana. Maybe some professor in Minneapolis was going to give me a call and say Glen, congratulations, you have purchased conceptual literature. Then I remembered nobody in Minneapolis knows I exist, and it was probably just a printing error.
Denny Has Feedback
I brought it into the shop the next morning to show the crew. Denny was already three cups deep, which is roughly his baseline. He looked at the cover, looked at me, looked back at the cover, and said, "Glen. That book don't say nothing."
"That's the beauty of it, Denny," I said. "It's a thesaurus with no words. It's an anti-thesaurus. It's — what's the word — minimalist."
Denny took a long slow sip of coffee and said, "You paid money for that."
"Two dollars."
"Two dollars," Denny said, in the exact tone a doctor uses when he tells you your cholesterol is a problem.
Then he went back to his morning paperwork, which he does every Thursday and which involves a lot of tapping his pen against the desk and occasionally muttering the phrase "good grief" under his breath. Denny's been running the office side of Sherman since long before I got here, and I have never once beat him in a conversation about money. Not once.
The Customer Test
About an hour later a customer came in wanting to talk about a 36 by 48 pole barn for hay storage down in Mille Lacs County. Nice fella, older, sharp eyes, the kind of guy who's built a few things in his life and can tell when somebody's tap dancing. I decided to try out my new thesaurus. Not the book — the book had no words, remember — but the concept. I was going to be resplendent.
He asked about roof pitch. I said, "For hay you want something that sheds snow well, so we usually recommend a — a — pronounced pitch. A stately pitch. A majestic pitch, if you will."
He looked at me. "You mean a 4/12 or a 5/12."
"Yes," I said. "That."
"You alright, Glen?"
"I'm resplendent," I said.
He blinked once, slow, the way a cow blinks when the barn cat walks past. Then he said, "I think I want to talk to Denny."
What The Thesaurus Actually Taught Me
Here's the thing about being in the building trade. Customers don't want resplendent. They don't want majestic. They want to know if the roof is going to hold up under two feet of wet April snow and whether the posts are going to still be there in thirty years. That's it. Every single fancy word I've ever tried to use with a customer has made me sound like I was hiding something, because usually the plain word is the honest word. A pitch is a pitch. A truss is a truss. A pole barn is a pole barn. You start calling it a "post-frame architectural expression" and folks reach for their wallets to make sure they still exist.
So maybe the blank thesaurus knew what it was doing. Two dollars to remind me that if you got something to say, say it plain. And if you don't got something to say, well — that's what a blank book is for.
I put it on the shelf in the office next to Denny's ledger. He walked by, looked at it, looked at me, and said, "You gonna write in it?"
"Nope," I said. "That would ruin it."
He grunted. In Denny, a grunt with no follow-up questions is a victory. I'll take it.
If you're up around Mora and want to talk about a pole barn — in plain words, roof pitch, truss size, post spacing, snow load, all the honest stuff — stop by Sherman or holler at us. I promise not to say resplendent.
Glen out. Watch your vocabulary.
