I'll know it when I see it.

Yes, I use my thesaurus the same way. I wouldn't pluck an unknown word out of it and plop it into a sentence, but sometimes the creative fires can be stoked by checking out a list of similar words with different shades of meaning. I especially like the one built into M$ Word for this, actually -- you can search through it in tree-fashion (i.e. clicking on one of the words in the list brings up the list for that word, which may be slightly different from the last list you were looking at).

Jackie -- No doubt the only time I've ever won any bling-related competition. Sadly, my connection to bleeding-edge urban slang (my brother) is now a landlord in the 'burbs, and engaged to be married, so I'm not nearly as up-to-date as I used to be. Now that people like me (and my formerly hip brother) are casually tossing words like "bling" and "crunk" around, I'm sure there are new words that have replaced them in the urban lingo; as it was, as it is, as it always will be.