Peter Mark Roget, the full name of the creator of Roget's thesaurus was indeed anal retentive. He seemed to have reasons, to say the least, to view life in a different way. He started his 'lists' as a tool to some form of normality. This piece from PROSPECT, I thought was very interesting, and worth the time. If you are familiar with the thesaurus, you will probably be interested in reading about the guy who wrote it.