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The other theoretical problems are very much more difficult. There are quite basic and very complex problems in any analysis of the processes of meaning. Some of these can be usefully isolated as general problems of signification: the difficult relations between words and concepts; or the general processes of sense and reference; and beyond these the more general rules, in social norms and in the system of language itself, which both enable sense and reference to be generated and in some large degree to control them. In linguistic philosophy and in theoretical linguistics these problems have been repeatedly and usefully explored, and there can be no doubt that as fundamental problems they bear with real weight on every particular analysis.

Yet just because ‘meaning’, in any active sense, is more than the general process of ‘signification’, and because ‘norms’ and ‘rules’ are more than the properties of any abstract process or system, other kinds of analysis remain necessary. The emphasis of my own analyses is deliberately social and historical. In the matters of reference and applicability, which analytically underlie any particular use, it is necessary to insist that the most active problems of meaning are always primarily embedded in actual relationships, and that both the meanings and the relationships are typically diverse and variable, within the structures of particular social orders and the processes of social and historical change.

This does not mean that the language simply reflects the processes of society and history. On the contrary, it is a central aim of this book to show that some important social and historical processes occur within language, in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and of relationships really are. New kinds of relationship, but also new ways of seeing existing relationships, appear in language in a variety of ways: in the invention of new terms (capitalism); in the adaptation and alteration (indeed at times reversal) of older terms (society or individual); in extension (interest) or transfer (exploitation). But also, as these examples should remind us, such changes are not always either simple or final. Earlier and later senses coexist, or become actual alternatives in which problems of contemporary belief and affiliation are contested. It is certainly necessary to analyse these and other consequent problems as problems of general signification, but my emphasis here is on a vocabulary of meanings, in a deliberately selected area of argument and concern.

My starting point, as I have said, was what can be called a cluster, a particular set of what came to seem interrelated words and references, from which my wider selection then developed. It is thus an intrinsic aim of the book to emphasize interconnections, some of which seem to me in some new ways systematic, in spite of problems of presentation which I shall discuss. It can of course be argued that individual words should never be isolated, since they depend for their meanings on their actual contexts. At one level this can be readily conceded. Many of the variable senses that I have analysed are determined, in practice, by contexts. Indeed this is why I mainly illustrate the different senses by actual examples in recorded use.

Yet the problem of meaning can never be wholly dissolved into context. It is true that no word ever finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process of language, and its uses depend on complex and (though variably) systematic properties of language itself. Yet it can still be useful to pick out certain words, of an especially problematical kind, and to consider, for the moment, their own internal developments and structures. This is so even when the qualification, ‘for the moment’, is ignored by one kind of reader, who is content to reassert the facts of connection and interaction from which this whole inquiry began. For it is only in reductive kinds of analysis that the processes of connection and interaction can be studied as if they were relations between simple units. In practice many of these processes begin within the complex and variable sense of particular words, and the only way to show this, as examples of how networks of usage, reference and perspective are developed, is to concentrate, ‘for the moment’, on what can then properly be seen as internal structures. This is not to impede but to make possible the sense of an extended and intricate vocabulary, within which both the variable words and their varied and variable interrelations are in practice active.

To study both particular and relational meanings, then, in different actual speakers and writers, and in and through historical time, is a deliberate choice. The limitations are obvious and are admitted. The emphasis is equally obvious and is conscious. One kind of semantics is the study of meaning as such; another kind is the study of formal systems of signification. The kind of semantics to which these notes and essays belong is one of the tendencies within historical semantics: a tendency that can be more precisely defined when it is added that the emphasis is not only on historical origins and developments but also on the present – present meanings, implications and relationships – as history. This recognizes, as any study of language must, that there is indeed community between past and present, but also that community – that difficult word – is not the only possible description of these relations between past and present; that there are also radical change, discontinuity and conflict, and that all these are still at issue and are indeed still occurring. The vocabulary I have selected is that which seems to me to contain the key words in which both continuity and discontinuity, and also deep conflicts of value and belief, are in this area engaged. Such processes have of course also to be described in direct terms, in the analysis of different social values and conceptual systems. What these notes and essays are intended to contribute is an additional kind of approach, through the vocabulary itself.

For I believe that it is possible to contribute certain kinds of awareness and certain more limited kinds of clarification by taking certain words at the level at which they are generally used, and this, for reasons related to and probably clear from all my other work, has been my overriding purpose. I have more than enough material on certain words (for example class and culture) and on certain formations (for example art, aesthetic, subjective, psychological, unconscious) to write, as an alternative, extended specialist studies, some themselves of book length. I may eventually do this, but the choice of a more general form and a wider range was again deliberate. I do not share the optimism, or the theories which underlie it, of that popular kind of inter-war and surviving semantics which supposed that clarification of difficult words would help in the resolution of disputes conducted in their terms and often evidently confused by them. I believe that to understand the complexities of the meanings of class contributes very little to the resolution of actual class disputes and class struggles. It is not only that nobody can ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’, nor only that anyone who really knows himself to be a member of a society knows better than to want, in those terms, to try. It is also that the variations and confusions of meaning are not just faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or deficiencies of education. They are in many cases, in my terms, historical and contemporary substance. Indeed they have often, as variations, to be insisted upon, just because they embody different experiences and readings of experience, and this will continue to be true, in active relationships and conflicts, over and above the clarifying exercises of scholars or committees. What can really be contributed is not resolution but perhaps, at times, just that extra edge of consciousness. In a social history in which many crucial meanings have been shaped by a dominant class, and by particular professions operating to a large extent within its terms, the sense of edge is accurate. This is not a neutral review of meanings. It is an exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion, which has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions and which has to be made at once conscious and critical – subject to change as well as to continuity – if the millions of people in whom it is active are to see it as active: not a tradition to be learned, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings which, because it is ‘our language’, has a natural authority; but as a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view: a vocabulary to use, to find our own ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history.

In writing about a field of meanings I have often wished that some form of presentation could be devised in which it would be clear that the analyses of particular words are intrinsically connected, sometimes in complex ways. The alphabetical listing on which I have finally decided may often seem to obscure this, although the use of cross-references should serve as a reminder of many necessary connections. The difficulty is that any other kind of arrangement, for example by areas or themes, would establish one set of connections while often suppressing another. If representative, for example, is set in a group of political words, perhaps centring on democracy, we may lose sight of a significant question in the overlap between representative government and representative art. Or if realism is set in a group of literary words, perhaps centring on literature or on art, another kind of overlap, with fundamental philosophical connotations and with descriptions of attitudes in business and politics, may again not be readily seen. Specialized vocabularies of known and separate academic subjects and areas of interest are, while obviously useful, very much easier both to write and to arrange. The word-lists can be fuller and they can avoid questions of overlap by deliberate limitation to meanings within the specialism. But since my whole inquiry has been into an area of general meanings and connections of meaning, I have been able to achieve neither the completeness nor the conscious limitation of deliberately specialized areas. In taking what seemed to me to be the significant vocabulary of an area of general discussion of culture and society, I have lost the props of conventional arrangement by subject and have then needed to retain the simplest conventional arrangement, by alphabetical order. However, since a book is only completed when it is read, I would hope that while the alphabetical order makes immediate use easier, other kinds of connection and comparison will suggest themselves to the reader, and may be followed through by a quite different selection and order of reading.

In this as in many other respects I am exceptionally conscious of how much further work and thinking needs to be done. Much of it, in fact, can only be done through discussion, for which the book in its present form is in part specifically intended. Often in the notes and essays I have had to break off just at the point where a different kind of analysis – extended theoretical argument, or detailed social and historical inquiry – would be necessary. To have gone in these other directions would have meant restricting the number and range of the words discussed, and in this book at least this range has been my priority. But it can also be said that this is a book in which the author would positively welcome amendment, correction and addition as well as the usual range of responses and comments. The whole nature of the enterprise is of this kind. Here is a critical area of vocabulary. What can be done in dictionaries is necessarily limited by their proper universality and by the long time-scale of revision which that, among other factors, imposes. The present inquiry, being more limited – not a dictionary but a vocabulary – is more flexible. My publishers have been good enough to include some blank pages, not only for the convenience of making notes, but as a sign that the inquiry remains open, and that the author will welcome all amendments, corrections and additions. In the use of our common language, in so important an area, this is the only spirit in which this work can be properly done.

I have to thank more people than I can now name who, over the years, in many kinds of formal and informal discussion, have contributed to these analyses. I have also especially to thank Mr R. B. Woodings, my editor, who was not only exceptionally helpful with the book itself, but who, as a former colleague, came to see me at just the moment when I was actively considering whether the file should become a book and whose encouragement was then decisive. My wife has helped me very closely at all stages of the work. I have also to record the practical help of Mr W. G. Heyman who, as a member of one of my adult classes thirty years ago, told me after a discussion of a word that as a young man he had begun buying the paper parts of the great Oxford Dictionary, and a few years later astonished me by arriving at a class with three cardboard boxes full of them, which he insisted on giving to me. I have a particular affection for his memory, and through it for these paper parts themselves – so different from the bound volumes and smooth paper of the library copies; yellowing and breaking with time, the rough uncut paper, the memorable titles – Deject to Depravation, Heel to Hod, R to Reactive and so on – which I have used over the years. This is a small book to offer in return for so much interest and kindness.

Cambridge, 1975, 1983

RW

Preface to the Second Edition

The welcome given to this book, in its original edition, was beyond anything its author had expected. This has encouraged me to revise it, in ways indicated in the original Introduction, though still with a sense of the work as necessarily unfinished and incomplete. In this new edition I have been able to include notes on a further twenty-one words: anarchism, anthropology, development, dialect, ecology, ethnic, experience, expert, exploitation, folk, generation, genius, jargon, liberation, ordinary, racial, regional, sex, technology, underprivileged and western. Some of these are reintroduced from my original list; others have become more important in the period between that original list and the present time. I have also made revisions, including both corrections and additions, in the original main text.

I want to record my warm thanks to the many people who have written or spoken to me about the book. Some of the new entries come from their suggestions. So too do many of the additions and corrections to the original notes. I cannot involve any of them in my opinions, or in any errors, but I am especially indebted to Aidan Foster-Carter, for a series of notes and particularly on development; to Michael McKeon, on many points but especially on revolution; to Peter Burke, for a most helpful series of notes; and to Carl Gersuny, for a series of notes and particularly on interest and work. I am specifically indebted to Daniel Bell on generation; Gerald Fowler on scientist; Alan Hall on history; P. B. Home on native; R. D. Hull on industrial; G. Millington, H. S. Pickering and N. Pitterger on education; Darko Suvin on communist and social; René Wellek on literature. I am also indebted for helpful suggestions and references to Perry Anderson, Jonathan Benthall, Andrew Daw, Simon Duncan, Howard Erskine-Hill, Fred Gray, Christopher Hill, Denis L. Johnston, A. D. King, Michael Lane, Colin MacCabe, Graham Martin, Ian Mordant, Benjamin Nelson, Malcolm Pittock, Vivien Pixner, Vito Signorile, Philip Tait, Gay Weber, Stephen White, David Wise, Dave Wootton, Ivor Wymer and Stephen Yeo.

Cambridge, May 1983

RW

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the text.

fw :	immediate forerunner of a word, in the same or another language.
rw :	ultimate traceable word, from which ‘root’ meanings arc derived.
q.v. :	see entry under word noted.
C :	followed by numeral, century (C19: nineteenth century).
eC :	first period (third) of a century.
mC :	middle period (third) of a century.
lC :	last period (third) of a century.
c. :	(before a date) approximately.
AN :	Anglo-Norman.
mE :	Middle English (c. 1100–1500).
oE :	Old English (to c. 1100).
F :	French.
mF :	Medieval French.
oF :	Old French.
G :	German.
Gk :	Classical Greek.
It :	Italian.
L :	Latin.
1L :	late Latin.
mL :	Medieval Latin.
vL :	Vulgar Latin.
Rom :	Romanic.
Sp :	Spanish.
OED :	New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford).

Quotations followed by a name and date only, or a date only, are from examples cited in OED. Other quotations are followed by specific sources. References to secondary works are by author’s name, as entered in References and Select Bibliography.

A

AESTHETIC

Aesthetic first appeared in English in C19, and was not common before mC19. It was in effect, in spite of its Greek form, a borrowing from German, after a critical and controversial development in that language. It was first used in a Latin form as the title of two volumes, Aesthetica (1750–8), by Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62). Baumgarten defined beauty as phenomenal perfection, and the importance of this, in thinking about art, was that it placed a predominant stress on apprehension through the senses. This explains Baumgarten’s essentially new word, derived from rw aisthesis, Gk – sense perception. In Greek the main reference was to material things, that is things perceptible by the senses, as distinct from things which were immaterial or which could only be thought. Baumgarten’s new use was part of an emphasis on subjective sense activity, and on the specialized human creativity of art, which became dominant in these fields and which inherited his title-word, though his book was not translated and had limited circulation. In Kant beauty was also seen as an essentially and exclusively sensuous phenomenon, but he protested against Baumgarten’s use and defined aesthetics in the original and broader Greek sense of the science of ‘the conditions of sensuous perception’. Both uses are then found in occasional eC19 English examples, but by mC19 reference to ‘the beautiful’ is predominant and there is a strong regular association with art. Lewes, in 1879, used a variant derived form, aesthesics, in a definition of the ‘abstract science of feeling’. Yet anaesthesia, a defect of physical sensation, had been used since eC18; and from mC19, with advances in medicine, anaesthetic – the negative form of the increasingly popular adjective – was widely used in the original broad sense to mean deprived of sensation or the agent of such deprivation. This use of the straight negative form led eventually to such negatives as unaesthetic or nonaesthetic in relation to the dominant use referring to beauty or to art.

In 1821 Coleridge wished that he could ‘find a more familiar word than aesthetics for works of TASTE and CRITICISM’ (qq.v.), and as late as 1842 aesthetics was referred to as ‘a silly pedantical term’. In 1859 Sir William Hamilton, understanding it as ‘the Philosophy of Taste, The theory of the Fine Arts, the Science of the Beautiful, etc.’, and acknowledging its general acceptance ‘not only in Germany but throughout the other countries of Europe’, still thought apolaustic would have been more appropriate. But the word had taken hold and became increasingly common, though with a continuing uncertainty (implicit in the theory which had led to the coinage) between reference to art and more general reference to the beautiful. By 1880 the noun aesthete was being widely used, most often in a derogatory sense. The principles and practices of the ‘aesthetic movement’ around Walter Pater were both attacked and sneered at (the best-remembered example is in Gilbert’s Patience (1880)). This is contemporary with similar feeling around the use of culture by Matthew Arnold and others. Aesthete has not recovered from this use, and the neutral noun relating to aesthetics as a formal study is the earlier (mC19) aesthetician. The adjective aesthetic, apart from its specialized uses in discussion of art and literature, is now in common use to refer to questions of visual appearance and effect.

It is clear from this history that aesthetic, with its specialized references to ART (q.v.), to visual appearance, and to a category of what is ‘fine’ or ‘beautiful’, is a key formation in a group of meanings which at once emphasized and isolated SUBJECTIVE (q.v.) sense-activity as the basis of art and beauty as distinct, for example, from social or cultural interpretations. It is an element in the divided modern consciousness of art and society: a reference beyond social use and social valuation which, like one special meaning of culture, is intended to express a human dimension which the dominant version of society appears to exclude. The emphasis is understandable but the isolation can be damaging, for there is something irresistibly displaced and marginal about the now common and limiting phrase ‘aesthetic considerations’, especially when contrasted with practical or UTILITARIAN (q.v.) considerations, which are elements of the same basic division.

See ART, CREATIVE, CULTURE, GENIUS, LITERATURE, SUBJECTIVE, UTILITARIAN