Firstly let me confess I didn't read the whole article because I am time-poor and I hate multipage article on the web!

Second, I use a thesaurus (Roget's, yes) to help bring back to mind a word I have forgotten. You know, all those ones that lurk at the tip of your tongue but won't come out of your mouth. If I found a word in the thesaurus I didn't know, I'd need to look it up in a dictionary or find some usage examples before I'd be happy using it. That's pretty much how I feel about most words when I first meet them, except that in other contexts, they tend to come with at least one example of usage.