Words in Time. A Social History of the English Vocabulary.

by Geoffrey Hughes
Review by: Elmar Schenkel
MLN, Vol. 106, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1991), pp. 1097-1100
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 M L N 1097

by the application of cognitive science models to the humanities are not

answered satisfactorily (such as the placement of ideology, background
knowledge, and belief systems in these models and the concurrent swing
towards the hermetic text), there is an attempt to return to the analysis of
the active role of the spectator/reader, a concern that poststructural and
psychoanalytic critiques seemed to have abandoned. Significantly, Car-
roll's theoretical approach leaves open the possibility for psychoanalytic
and poststructural approaches to inform his model, despite his massive
reservations concerning these critical discourses. As a result, the theoret-
ical possibilities raised by his model of "art-horror" outweigh the problems
of the model itself.

McGill University SCOTT MACKENZIE

Geoffrey Hughes. Wordsin Time. A Social History of the English Vocabulary.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Language as the House of Being, as Heidegger has it? Forget it. Reading
Geoffrey Hughes's fascinating and disturbing account of how meaning
drifts, shrinks, expands in time one not only gains a sense of the ephem-
eral nature of signs but also of their utter malleability and vulnerability to
socio-economic and political change. Language is not a matter of bricks
and mortar, a building cemented against the onslaught of the ages; it is no
place to live in-or so it seems. Do we then have to conclude that the most
renowned egg-head in history was right after all? "'When I use a word,'
said Humpty-Dumpty scornfully to Alice, 'it means just what I choose it to
mean-neither more nor less. . . . The question is which is to be master,
that's all.'" But who or which then is the master? Is it the Ego as opposed
to the Id, or an identifiable ruling class, or the compilers of the mythic
OED, of Larousse and Duden? Or is it some tendency in history, some
evolutionary black box or that devious fellow called Zeitgeist who wields
such an unfathomable power over the collective unconscious?
No answer to this can be expected from the thorough and detailed study
Hughes presents here to those readers who have always been curious
about the fate of words and outraged about the decline of language con-
sciousness in contemporary Western cultures. These impulses seem to
inform Hughes's explorations into the history of meaning. At the outset he
acknowledges his debts to such forerunners as C. S. Lewis (Studies in
Words), Owen Barfield (History in English Words), and Raymond Williams
(Keywords).But the scope and depth of Hughes's analysis goes quite be-
yond these pioneers. (Logan Pearsall Smith and Ernest Weekley would
well have deserved a place in the ample bibliography). Hughes succeeds in
relating the individual histories of words to a larger development in En-
glish history since, in his view, semantic shifts correspond to fundamental

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1098 REVIEWS

social changes that have transformed the outlook of man in the modern
age.
Words are so much part of our mental furniture-they actually consti-
tute it-that the unearthing of their original meanings sometimes comes
with the power of a revelation. As we look into the deep well of a word's
history we cannot help feeling giddy over this dark backward and abysm of
time: Note that giddy is bound by etymological roots to God. God, inciden-
tally, has survived even Nietzsche in a number of expressions: Goodbye
('God be with you'), gospel ('God's message'), gossip ('relation in god') or
zounds! ('God's wounds').
Secularization is indeed one of the forces that have effected changes in
the meaning of words. Take the Seven Deadly Sins for example (pp. 32
ff.): Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice and Sloth. Most of them
have undergone a substantial amelioration: "Under the modern ethos of
conspicuous consumption, a form of competitive materialism, these tradi-
tional vices are becoming desirable and respectable" (p. 33). Wrath as
'justifiable anger' is as much accepted nowadays as covetousness, avarice
and envy have become indispensable ingredients in the consumer's psy-
chology. Gluttony and Lust are increasingly viewed as elements of the
'good life,' while Sloth and Idleness have turned into assets eagerly boosted
by the leisure industries. Passion is another instance. In the Middle Ages
restricted to Christ's suffering, it gradually-with the emergence of Ro-
manticism-assumed the opposite meaning, i.e., that of a pleasurable and
obsessive self-fulfilment. Secularization then has to be seen as part of a
larger transformation that previous writers like Lewis and Barfield tended
to neglect. What Hughes then does is to provide the material underpin-
ning to the evolution of consciousness so essential to Barfield's thought.
"Put simply," Hughes asserts, "the alternative to the medieval model of
hierarchy is that of competition" (p. 7). This crucial insight forms the basis
of the book's case-histories of words and semantic fields. The study pro-
vides illuminating discussions of the semantic impact which the post-
medieval emergence of individualism, democracy, capitalism and the re-
lated institutions, classes and functions has made on the European con-
sciousness. The chapters follow a chronological order which covers words
of conquest and status-the semantic legacy of the Middle Ages-, the
effects of social mobility and more recent phenomena such as advertising,
journalism, and propaganda.
Linguistic habits have such a spell on us that we indeed need historical
awareness to be able to return to a more reasonable use of language.
Money has been one of the most effective transformers of values, and it so
much permeates all social relations that a look at case-histories can be
helpful in breaking the spell. The biographies of words such as purchase
(related to 'chase'), pay (from 'to pacify'), fee (cognate with 'feudal') and
above all fortune (from 'chance' to 'wealth') are poignant examples. The

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 M L N 1099

mobilization of social relations and values is reflected in a new mobility of

words that was made possible through printing. In this respect, Hughes's
research provides an interesting complement to MacLuhan's The Gutenberg
Galaxyor to the work of Walter J. Ong. As the oral and manuscript culture
of the Middle Ages was superseded by typography, words increasingly
became mobile and the whole economy of speech was affected. Modern
phenomena such as the pamphlet, polemical controversies, promotional
language, and advertising began to change the functions of language and
influenced historical events during the Reformation and the English Civil
War.
It is revealing that Caxton's first printed document in England (c. 1477)
was the advertisement for a church calendar. Hughes: "Caxton's language
has more affinities with Madison Avenue than might be expected. 'Fayne
wolde I satisfye every man,' he remarks in the Prologue to the Eneydos,
thereby revealing the profit motive that lies behind much of his language"
(p. 100 f.). Before Caxton, Eric the Red had coined the name of Greenland
in order to entice future settlers to this cold and barren place. Ever since,
advertisers have capitalized on a human quality-the potential of hope and
expectation. Their tool is, as Dr. Johnson saw, the language of promise.
This tool has, over the last eighty years or so, converted English into one
great machinery for raising expectations. Language has increasingly been
viewed as one gigantic resource, free for the taking, which can be abused,
modified, amalgamated and appropriated endlessly. With the marketing
purpose of language thus surfacing the whole concept of truth seems to be
profoundly altered. Furthermore, plundering word-hoards has resulted in
deliberately illiterate spelling ('kwik' for 'quick,' 'nite' for 'night') and
brand-names proliferate as they usurp original meanings. Compounding
words in commercials, journalese and media-ese have led to an erosion of
the very structure of English. In the political and commercial speech,
forms of mediocracy, general-purpose terms have come to mean almost
anything (thus approaching the nature of money). Words such as process,
information,performance,condition have turned into objects worthy of con-
sideration in polymer sciences. This kind of devaluation seems to be the
other side of 'democratic progress.' Progress,by the way, originally referred
to a royal state-journey, but since the eighteenth century has become the
ideological obsession of the West; nowadays, as the scientific pessimist
Erwin Chargaff noted, we deplore the absence of the same in those cul-
tures that mysteriously do without Coca-Cola and psychoanalysis. Hughes,
in considering the even more vicious aspects of propaganda or Orwell's
terrifyingly topical doublespeakconcludes that actually a large verbicide is
taking place on this planet.
Though he is surveying the socio-economic sources of semantic change,
Hughes cannot be said to be taking a materialistic view. The very fact that
language is the central concern prevents the author from the fallacy of

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1100 REVIEWS

positivism. Rather, language-and that means conscious and unconscious

habits combined-is seen as one of the most powerful agents of change as
it implements new habits and attitudes regarding values, environment,
history, and human goals. Auden accounted for the power of language
when he spoke of its magical nature, while for George Steiner there is no
escape from language: "History is a language-net cast backwards".
Given this all-pervasiveness of language, are we then justified, as
Hughes seems to be feeling, in despairing over the increasingly babel-
like-or babble-like-state of speech? As so often, the metaphor is in ques-
tion. For when we describe language we resort to a number of rhetorical
devices in order to represent something that is so hard to grasp. In this
review alone, language was seen as a system of containers, of economies, or
as a prison, as people, wells, or money. Hughes implicitly talks of traffic
signals (de Saussure would concur), tools, physical objects, and entropy,
but by far the most prevalent metaphor is the view of language as an
organism-a romantic legacy that still seems to have a strong grip on us. It
allows us to speak of the "seminal" qualities of terms, the "growth" of
semantic fields, and the "mutations" of meaning.
Possibly a more comprehensive metaphor would be able to encompass
all these meanings and at the same time help us clarify our goals in regard
to language. Terms like "erosion" point to the possibility of seeing lan-
guage as a special kind of environment. To the extent that language com-
bines material and immaterial, natural and artificial constituents it reflects
the properties of any environment. Hence the conclusion that we may well
be in need of an ecology of language as much as we need an ecology of
nature and human habitat. This would afford a necessary distance to
Heidegger's solemn term of the House of Being and yet retain his inten-
tion of seeing in language a type of environment that calls for care, atten-
tion, love, and consciousness. As things are, however, no central policy will
be wanted to restore the dignity that Heidegger thought language at one
stage may have had. In this dead patch of history we inhabit there can only
be hope for the odd individual with a sense of care, responsibility, and a
good deal of wrath and satire relentlessly to point out the pollution and
erosion in this particular (and yet universal) environment. Some kind of
Greenpeace-action in the realm of language will be required-an action of
the kind great critics of mediocratic poppycock(note the relation between
nonsense and excrement, p. 235) such as Karl Kraus in Vienna or George
Orwell in England fought. What we simply need is good writers. For, as
Ezra Pound noted in the ABC of Reading: "Good writers are those who
keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
More books of the kind Hughes has written would serve this purpose of
creating the conditions for better writers.

Albert-Ludwigs-Universitit,Freiburg ELMAR SCHENKEL

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