Obsolete old words from seventeenth-century English villages reflect the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, bizarre foods, magic, horses, outrageous sexism, feudal duties. New words, first appearing in print 1650–1800, reflect a middle-class culture very different from an earlier courtly culture, interested in money, coffee-houses, and self-fulfillment. The book contains chapters on pre-industrial and middle-class culture, the scientific revolution, and semantic change. They give strong evidence that new words and the new senses of old words played a key role in the British Enlightenment, its links with quantification and natural science, its tendencies towards reorganization and democracy, its redefinitions and revitalizations of women’s roles, social stereotypes, the public sphere, and the very concepts of individualism, sociability, and civilization itself.
Author(s): Carey McIntosh
Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 315
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 230
City: Leiden
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. First Thoughts
2. Very Often, We Do Things with Words
3. A Preview of Six Chapters
4. Words and History
Chapter 1. Old Words
1. Rural Life
2. A Village Doles Out Punishments
3. Cooking and Eating
4. Remnants of Feudalism
5. Hunting
6. Proverbs
7. Magic
Chapter 2. New Words and the Middle Class
1. New Words and Cultural Change
2. The Invention of Comfort
3. A 'Conversable World'
Chapter 3. The Enlightenment
1. Orderliness, Organization, and Modernity
2. A Gradual Spread of Democratic Values
3. Weights and Measures
Chapter 4. Science and the English Language
1. The Royal Society
2. Artificial Languages and Prose Style
3. Scientific Words
4. Anna Wierzbicka and Empirical Science
Chapter 5. Words, Cultural Change, and History
1. Old Words in Dictionaries
2. Local Words
3. New Words – Party and Fun
4. Language and Culture and History
5. The Politicization of English
Chapter 6. New Words in the Enlightenment
1. Individuality and Self-Consciousness
2. Bluestocking
3. 'Public' Words and the Public Sphere
4. Sympathy
5. Commercial
6. Classification
7. Critique and Cosmopolitan
8. Conclusion
'Party' and 'Fun' – Texts
More Old Words
New Words
Works Cited
Index
