Ponder/consider/regard the thesaurus

The current issue of Lapham's Quarterly has a long and rather interesting article about the background of Roget's Thesaurus and how it has been viewed by various scholars and authors.  Some excerpts:

Consulting a thesaurus to find these closely related sets of words is only the first step for a writer looking for le mot juste: the peculiar individuality of each would-be synonym must then be carefully judged. Mark Twain knew the perils of relying on the family resemblance of words: “Use the right word,” he wrote, “not its second cousin.”..

Peter Mark Roget... organized sets of synonyms according to one thousand categories, neatly arrayed in a two-column format. Roget was utterly obsessive about making lists, keeping a notebook full of them as early as eight years old, and by age twenty-six he had compiled a hundred-page draft of what would become his greatest work. List making was a welcome relief from his chronic depression and tumultuous family life; it was a way of imposing order on a messy reality...

As Roget first conceived it, the book did not even have an alphabetical index—he included it later as an afterthought. His goal, then, was not to provide a simple method of replacing synonym A with synonym B but instead to encourage a fuller understanding of the world of ideas and the language representing it...

The view of it as a mere crutch persists to this day, especially among writers of fiction and poetry who see the frequent consultation of it as somehow impeding natural expression. Consider this pronouncement from Stephen King in a 1986 piece for The Writer:

You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.  

Much more at the link.  The topic came to mind when I encountered the cartoon embedded at the top.  It was above the upper margin of a different cartoon, so the top is cut off.  What caught my eye was this awkward phrase:

"Into the dark night lonely howls lade the blackness and fill a dog's void."

What in the world was the cartoonist thinking?  "Lade" is a synonym for "burden" or "to fill."  I think the cartoonist must have written "Into the dark night lonely howls fill the blackness and fill a dog's void," then noted the repetition and reached for a thesaurus to get a synonym for "fill."  Has anyone out there (Brits in particular) encountered the word "lade" used in this fashion?

And finally/lastly/in conclusion this coffee mug:

Also available as a t-shirt, from the Neatoshop.