Currently Reading: Raymond Williams – Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1976/1983) Fontana Press
From wikipedia: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is a book by the Welsh Marxist academic Raymond Williams published in 1976 by Croom Helm, with a revised and expanded edition published by Fontana in 1983.
Originally intended to be published along with the author’s 1958 work Culture and Society, this work examines the history of more than a hundred words that are familiar and yet confusing: Art; Bureaucracy; Culture; Educated; Management; Masses; Nature; Originality; Radical; Society; Welfare; Work; and many others.
The approach is cultural rather than etymological. Sometimes the origins of a word cast light on its meaning, but often one finds that it originally meant something quite different. Or that there has been a fierce political struggle over the ‘correct’ meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keywords:_A_Vocabulary_of_Culture_and_Society
I’m looking at Williams’ approach as I think about how to treat my “keywords” and the definitions and appropriations of Crap, Debris, Detritus, Dirt, Discards, Garbage, Junk, Leftovers, Litter, Mongo, Refuse, Rejects, Remains, Rubbish, Ruins, Scrap, Shit, Shreds, Trash and Waste.
Williams introduces Keywords as “an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. (p.15)
In defining the selected words, especially those which involve ideas and values, is not only impossible, Williams declares, but an irrelevant procedure. He asserts that it is the range of meanings, and values that matters. (p.17)
“Keywords is based on several areas of specialist knowledge but its purpose is to bring these, in the examples selected, into general knowledge, meanings and contexts.”
The intrinsic nature of the book is to emphasize the interconnections.
“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.” (p.22)
