Geoffrey Hughes’ Words in Time: A social history of the English vocabulary(1988) offers a different take on space-and-time and language, centered on the notion of semantic fields (“containing those words or meanings which cohere around a particular concept, topic, or thing”).

The book’s dedication says

To
all workers
at the alveary
It was the work of a moment to ask the online OED about ‘alveary’, and so to discover

	Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin alveārium.
	Etymology: classical Latin alveārium... 
 	1.
	a. A repository, esp. of knowledge or information. Originally as the 
        name of a dictionary encompassing several languages. 1574—1983

 	b. A beehive. Also: the location where a beehive stands; an apiary. 
        Now rare. 1623—1918

	†2. A hollow in the external ear in which earwax collects; (also) the 
        external auditory canal. Obsolete.

The book itself begins with a quotation from Owen Barfield (who was, with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, a member of the Inklings):

It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.

Hughes is primarily concerned with words as “semantic legacy” (e.g., of the Middle Ages, of the Growth of Capitalism, Journalism, Advertising, Ideology and Propaganda), and he presents words identified as belonging to semantic fields schematically, as circles showing registers of terminology:

and, for example,

and in tabular and chronological form:

The last thirty-plus years is a long time in lexicographical evolution, and in 2020 Hughes’ approach seems rather fusty and even a bit pedestrian; the online version of the OED produces more detailed versions straight out of the box, with dates and quotations, and yields nicely built collocations of terms in the Thesaurus mode. It’s still a pleasure to sample the pages of Words in Time for the odd bits that delight word hounds, and for the discursive style of a bygone era:

For centuries purchase meant something far more rapacious and disorderly than the present transactional sense denotes. The old senses of purchase, dating in ME from c.1297, were derived from chase and revolved around the actions of hunting and taking by force, whether the object were prey, person, plunder, or pelf. (In Old French an enfant de porchas was not, as one might suppose, a child adopted or ‘purchased’ in slavery, but an illegitimate.) These meanings reflect an ancient, primitive time when de jure and de facto possession were often difficult to distinguish, more so than today. The original strong physical sense of purchase, we observe is still used in contexts of leverage in physics and engineering.

To appreciate that 30-plus years’ distance in register, compare with A “Let’s Circle Back” Guy.

About 50 years ago (or maybe more) I realized that I saw anthropology through the lenses of Space and Time, that I was in fact a geographer manqué, but fortunately anthropology has usually been quite tolerant of interdisciplinarity, and my cartographic and diachronic foibles were indulged by graduate school professors. Once I escaped into the professorate myself, nobody questioned my creation of a course in Human Geography (which I taught for most of my 18 years at Acadia), and my side hustles into demography and ethnomusicology and linguistics puzzled but didn’t affright faculty colleagues. The escape (after 1990) into the world of libraries was even more liberating in extra-disciplinary senses. As one of my mentors in Reference Librarianship put it, “It All Counts!”, and I bloody counted it all for 13 years at Washington & Lee.

Words have always been a signal element in my cross-disciplinary forays, fiercely pursued and lovingly collected and then deployed to sometimes-bemused audiences. And so when I saw David Crystal’s Words in Time and Place: Exploring language through The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary I immediately snaffled it up. That Thesaurus, a 2-volume behemoth published in 2009, tempted me mightily, but at $495 I hesitated… and now it’s mostly available on the used market for upwards of $600 if it can be found at all. Crystal’s little book is an irresistable aperitif:

My aim is to illustrate the way the HTOED is organized, to show the synergy between the thesaurus and its lexicographical parent, and to explore some of the linguistic and social insights that emerge from this interaction…

The alphabetical principle [of the dictionary] is an enormous convenience (once one has learned to spell), but it is a semantic irrelevance. Words which belong together are separated… We do not learn words in alphabetical order, either as children or adults. Rather, we learn them in a meaningful relation to each other as we develop our understanding of areas of experience…

Words and meanings change over time, so it is crucial to know what period we are dealing with before we are able to interpret someone’s lexical use…

…our ability to select an appropriate wordd depends on our awareness of such factors as where the word is used—by which sections of society, on which social occasions, in which part of the country or of the English-speaking world…

Crystal offers terminology from 15 semantic fields: words for dying, nose, being drunk, light meals, a privy, a fool, terms of endearment, oaths and exclamations, inns and hotels, a prostitute, money, calm and stormy weather, old person, sspacecraft… presented as chronological tables, timelines. Here’s a sample from the 20 pages of “words for being drunk”:

…..

I snagged a copy of the buckram-clad Compact Edition of the OED about 35 years ago (complete with rectangular magnifying glass) and bought the Supplement when it came out in 1987; in 1995 I had an opportunity to explore the online OED, and did a lot of searches that are a delight to explore again via the page I constructed to introduce the online version W&L colleagues.

And today I bit whatever bullets were available and got myself a subscription ($90/year, a bargain) to the current online version of the OED, which includes the Historical Thesaurus. I look forward to further lexicographical explorations…

And if you’ve gotten this far in today’s post, here’s a Reward:

I’ll take up dialect and other-Englishes word books in future postings.

Today’s “word book” is Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science (2004), a true gem of a book and one of the few on my shelves that is concerned with a single word and its connections. (The F Word is another, and we’ll get there eventually).

I wish I could remember when I first encountered ‘serendipity’, but it’s been with me for a long time as a personal leitmotiv, as I’ve wandered from thing to thing, notion to notion, idea to idea over the years. There’s a succession of factoids that piles up as one explores serendipity: the term was coined by Horace Walpole, in a letter to his friend Horace Mann in 1754; it is derived from or references a folk/fairy story of Three Princes of Serendib, the narrative line of which follows their fortuitous discoveries/inferences. Serendipity has come to mean discovery of the unexpected while in search of something else.

Of course, there’s much more to the story, and Merton & Barber are superb guides. I’ll include here a few bits of detail to whet the reader’s interest.

The 1754 letter from Walpole to Mann is redolent of 18th century epistolary prose (you can almost hear the scratching of the quill pen), and of essence of Walpole’s whimsy:

…This discovery I made by a talisman, which Mr. Chute calls the sortes Walpolianae, by which I find everything I want, à point nommée [at the very moment], wherever I dip for it. This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you; you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand Serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) was of my lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.

It’s basic dictionary knowledge that ‘Serendip’ refers to Sri Lanka/Ceylon. But, says the etymologically curious, why Serendip/b? There’s a whole section of Merton & Barber that traces the history of dictionary definitions of ‘serendipity’ and includes this from the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1909 supplement&mdashthe first dictionary definition of ‘serendipity’):

…the name of Serendib figures in Eastern romance. The name is from Ar. Serendib, Sarandib also Sarandip (LL: Serendivi, pl., as the name of the people), MGr. Skt. Sinhala-dvipa, the island of Ceylon… The Skt. Simhala is in Pali Sihalan, whence Silan, Old Tamil Ilan, whence the Malay Sailan, European Seilan, Zeilon, Ceylon… The happy faculty or luck, of finding by “accidental sagacity” interesting items of information or unexpected proofs of one’s theories; discovery of thing unsought: a factitious word humorously invented by Horace Walpole…

Clearly more than one wanted to know, and yet full of delicious nubbins. ‘Factitious’, say Merton & Barber “is well on its way to becoming a pejorative word, growing out of its meaning of ‘artificial’ and ‘unnatural’…” Elsewhere, Merton & Barber note that

In the early years of the twentieth century, a shop was opened in London to cater to those very bibliophiles who wanted “out-of-the-way books,” books by not-so-well-known authors at rather moderate prices. The first mention we have found of it comes, not surprisingly perhaps, in the form of a query in Notes and Queries… in 1903, one John Hebb writes: “A shop has recently opened at No. 118 Westbourne Grove, with the extraordinary name of ‘Serendipity Shop.” What is the meaning of ‘Serendipity’? I may add that the shop appears to be intended for the sale of rare books, pictures, and what Mrs. Malaprop (was it Mrs. Malaprop?) calls ‘articles of bigotry and virtue.’

Among the hares started by this nubbin is the pointer to Notes and Queries,

…a long-running quarterly scholarly journal that publishes short articles related to ‘English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism’. Its emphasis is on ‘the factual rather than the speculative’. The journal has a long history, having been established in 1849 in London; it is now published by Oxford University Press. The journal was originally subtitled ‘a medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc’. It is now subtitled ‘For readers and writers, collectors and librarians’. Its motto was once ‘When found, make a note of’, the catchphrase of Capt. Cuttle, a character in Dickens’ Dombey and Son…

Wikisource has a portal to archive.org’s 1849-1922 holdings, to be explored on Rainy Days…

So many other facets of Merton & Barber draw one’s attention. Merton wrote On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript in 1965 (a thrice-marvelous analysis of the reach of that titular phrase ascribed to Isaac Newton but at least as old as Diego de Estella [Latin: Didacus Stella], a 16th-century Spanish Franciscan mystic and theologian), known as ‘OTSOG’ in some circles: “part parody, part history of ideas, and part sociology of science” as the back-cover blurb has it). In a footnote in that book he mentions The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity as “a carefully unpublished” manuscript. The Introduction tantalizes us thus:

Sometime in or before 1945, while looking for the definition of some now-forgotten word in volume 9 of The Oxford English Dictionary, Merton’s eye “happened upon the strange looking but euphonious word ‘serendipity.’ Just as Walpole wrote of his habit of playing a sortes Walpolianae, a random flip of the page led Merton to serendipity. It was, when Merton originally stumbled upon it, a strange beast pacing restlessly within the confines of a few learned vocabularies. Had he not chosen to spend a significant portion of his third-year graduate student stipend on the then twelve massive volumes of the OED, he might not have ever stumbled on the word. Had he heeded the call of whatever his pledged mission was that day—learning about sequestration or seraphim or sepulcher—this sociological tale of the wanderings of serendipity would have been stalled, ensnared in the maze of the dictionary, imprisoned from further adventures until some other wandering eye might find it and send it on its way.

As Merton himself notes in the Preface, the book was written in the 1950s, but first appeared in print only in 2002, in Italian. The Princeton University Press version in English appeared in 2004, with a magnificent Afterword by Merton (“Autobiographic reflections on The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”). Merton died in 2003, and Barber in 1999.

I awoke thinking of a mode of language and rhetoric that is ubiquitous in political discourse and especially in parlous times. The words that came to me were: self-serving, mollification, deception, bamboozlement, Buncombe. Which of my word books address this realm?

Word books live in temporal and spatial contexts. The two-word phrases of Grenville Kleiser’s Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases echo the world of the book’s publication in 1917, and part of their charm and bite is that they are slightly outside of the current vernacular, but not so far removed that we can’t grasp their messages and apply them to our 21st century concerns and sensibilities.

In November 2003 I did a consultation gig on the GIS program at St. Lawrence University in uppermost New York—flew to Ottawa (the nearest airport), drove a rental car to Canton NY, spent a couple of days talking with faculty and staff, wrote a report. While in Canton I (of course) wandered into the college bookstore and found the just-published Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War (edited by John Collins and Ross Glover), which presents short essays (“written to expose the tyranny of political rhetoric used to justify ‘America’s New War’.”) on 14 concepts that were especially of interest in those early years of the War in Iraq, after the shocks of September 11, 2001:

Anthrax, Blowback, Civilization versus Barbarism, Cowardice, Evil, Freedom, Fundamentalism, Jihad, Justice, Targets, Terrorism, Unity, Vital Interests, The War on _____

Most of those will resonate with anybody who was watching and listening in the early years of the 21st century. Collateral Language can be read as a gauge of the Emperor’s Raiment of that time, and of the modes of speech and rhetoric deployed in mass media.

U.S. officials, like their counterparts in decades past, attempted to generate public support for their actions by appealing to ideas as powerful as they are abstract: freedom, civilization, terrorism, evil. This language needs interrogation wherever it is found… Language, like terrorism,targets civilians and generates fear in order to effect political change… a specific type of fearfulness emerges, both intentionally and unintentionally… The use of specific kinds of language for political purposes exists within a long historical lineage of human development, and in order to understand any political system, we must understand the meaning created by that system. Rather than blindly accepting the meaning, usage, and truth of political leaders and news stories, we have an obligation, as citizens of a democratic state, to question, critique, and understand the language given to us by those who claim to represent our interests… (from the Introduction)

Manufacturing Consent … What You Hear Is What You See …

From Ross Glover’s “The War on _____”:

Fill in the blank. Regardless of what word you insert, the American public understands. U.S. presidents learned this lesson well over the past 40 [now almost 60…] years. “The War on _____” plays on our competitive heartstrings like a football cheer. “Yes,” we seem to respond, “fight the good fight, O fearless President, fight the war for us, fight the war for the good of humanity, but most importantly just fight.”

Poverty, Drugs, Terrorism, the “Chinese Virus”…

What Goes Around Comes Around.

I have a LOT of “word books”: dictionaries, glossaries, usage manuals, specialized lexicons, etymologies, slang, commentaries on how she is spoke… This seems to be the moment to consider that trove, that tranche of my home library, and to put it to work.

This thought arose as I was exploring my mountain of Kindle texts and happened upon

Grenville Kleiser
Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases: A Practical Handbook of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, and Oratorical Terms, for the Embellishment of Speech and Literature, and The Improvement of the Vocabulary of Those Persons Who Read, Write, and Speak English

which can be downloaded via Project Gutenberg and, in another form, via LibriVox (e.g., https://ia800208.us.archive.org/11/items/15000_useful_phrases_librivox/useful_phrases_003_kleiser_64kb.mp3 )

and there’s even a 10 hour YouTube video of a Dramatic Reading: https://youtu.be/luTcjXsFbNI

The tipping point for me was glancing at a page of Kleiser’s phrases and seeing that just about every one I looked at was somehow relevant to the Moment we find ourselves in:

abandoned hope
abated pride
abbreviated visit
abhorred thraldom
abiding romance
abject submission
abjured ambition
able strategist
abnormal talents
abominably perverse
abounding happiness
abridged statement
abrogated law
abrupt transition
absolutely irrevocable
absorbed reverie
abstemious diet
…and so on

And so I found myself thinking about Boccaccio’s Decameron which, if you didn’t already know, consists of “…100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city…” in the 14th century.

…and bethought myself that there might be a Decamoron which collects dumb-ass commentary and jokes about the present straits; and a Decamiron for ironic commentary on the same; and perhaps others (Decamuron might be the tales of mice… etc.)

Anyway, I’m thinking to begin a Project to blog a dictionary-a-day (or maybe not quite so often), with a scanned page showing a particularly wonderful something from that volume, and providing some context for what each dictionary/word book is actually good for.