...an accumulation, a bundle, a clutch, a dithyramb, an excess, a fardel, a gallimaufry, a hoard, an iteration, a jocoserie, a kindlement, a legomenon, a murmuration, a nidulation, an overrun, a passel, a roundel, a superfluity, a tranche, a ululation, a vortex, a warren, a yolking, a xenogamy, a zarzuela... you get the idea, but I welcome suggestions of others for alternatives and improvements on the abecedarium, and for additional quotations that address other facets and features of lexicon.
Ted Striphas The Late Age of Print
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Words are events, they do things, change things.
They transform both speaker and hearer;
they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.
Ursula Le Guin, from The Wave in the Mind
The lexicon... is not organized alphabetically but rather
in word groupings whose members share similarities
from the point of view of their form and/or of their meaning...
A dictionary is an attempt to describe the lexicon...
...Lexicon and semantics intersect but do not coincide. (pp 1, 2, 5)
from The Lexicon: An Introduction (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics) Elisabetta Jezek (2016)
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...in order to expose, counter, harness, resist, or evade
the forces of today's political and technological regimes of uncertainty,
new theoretical vocabularies, methods, and alliances are needed.
Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. 2021, pg 2
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...
"When you take a word in your mouth," observes Hans-Georg Gadamer,
"you have not taken up some arbitrary tool that can be thrown in a corner if it doesn't do the job,
but you are committed to a line of thought that comes from afar and reaches beyond you."
...by questioning the seemingly monumental status of words and their definitions;
and by reminding you that
you are a part of the collective endeavor whereby new and better meanings
"are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, and changed."
Ted Striphas Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet pg 228-229
The everyday meaning and the etymological meaning of a word
can teach us nothing about ourselves,
since they represent the collective part of language,
which was made for all people and not for each of us individually.
By dissecting the words we like, without bothering about conforming
either to their etymologies or to their accepted signification,
we discover their more hidden qualities and the secret ramifications
that are propagated through the whole language,
channeled by associations of sounds, forms, and ideas.
Then language changes into an oracle,
and there we have a thread (however slender it may be)
to guide us through the Babel of our minds.
Michel Leiris Brisées pg 5 (1925)
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