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Anahtar Sözcükler: Kültür ve Toplumun Sözvarlığı
18. yüzyıldan 19. yüzyıla dönüldüğünde İngiliz toplumu, Fransız Devrimi ve Endüstri Devrimi arasında değişiyor, bu değişim gündelik hayatta, dil ve anlayış farklılıklarını beraberinde getiriyordu. Kültür denen büyük gövdeye sınıf, sanat, endüstri ve demokrasi sözcükleri dahil oluyor, başka sözcükler de yeni bir tanımlama, anlamlandırma için dilin dünyasına sızıyordu. Bu sözcüklerin kimisi başka şekil ve anlamla dilin içinde mevcutken değişerek, kimisi de üzerlerindeki ölü toprağını silkeleyerek dile geri dönüyorlardı. Raymond Williams Anahtar Sözcükler’de seçili kimi kelimelerin tarihsel dönüşümünü toplumun kültürel tarihi açısından ele alıyor. Bu sözcükler, kimi zaman köken anlamlarını taşıyarak kimi zaman da yepyeni anlamlara bürünerek dönüşmekte olan kültürü sırtlanıyorlardı. Anahtar Sözcükler bu süreci anlamak için 'çilingir'in ihtiyacı olabilecek seçili kelimelerden oluşuyor. Bu nedenle, klasik sözlüklerden hem işlev hem de içerik olarak farklı bir kitap hüviyeti taşıyor. Yalnızca İngilizce için değil, benzer bir kültürel dönüşüm süreci yaşayan bütün dillere bu tür bir etkide bulunduğu için Anahtar Sözcükler 'e dikkat etmekte fayda var!
415 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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2210 people want to read
About the author
Raymond Williams
207 books265 followersRaymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic. He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Among his many books are Culture and Society, Culture and Materialism, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and several novels.
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October 16, 2020
As I get older, I’ve been becoming more interested in etymology. Years ago I read a book about metaphor and poetry that said that most words start off as metaphors – essentially that we are all synesthetics – and that even as words change their meanings over time, there is a residual of these early metaphorical meanings that linger around the new meanings of the word. What is interesting about this residual meaning is that you don’t particularly have to ‘know’ the original ‘meaning’ of the work for the original meaning to affect the current meaning of the word.
This can all sound a bit like mystical nonsense, but I don’t mean it to. And I also don’t want it to sound like I’m saying something even more snobby, even if I suspect that the snobby meaning might hold more truth – that is, that knowing the etymology of words is something likely to be more available to certain classes than it is to ‘the rest of us’ and so ‘they’ are able to understand the nuance of meanings better than ‘we’ are. I think learning the etymology of words complicates their meanings, showing shades of meaning we might not have otherwise notice.
But Williams is particularly opposed to this idea in its most boldly stated form. He points out that the idea people can speak their own native language all of their lives, and yet not be understood to be able to speak it ‘properly’ is one of the most obnoxious versions of class shaming imaginable. And I totally agree – but I also think learning the genealogy of words brings ideas to life in ways it is hard to achieve otherwise.
Word origins and their shifts in meaning can give us a strange sense of vertigo. Recently, I learnt that ‘normal’ only came into the English language in the mid-17th century. That means that Shakespeare never referred to anyone as ‘normal’ – in fact, for that sense of the word you had to wait until the early 19th century (I think you needed to wait for statistics to become a thing). Imagine not being able to say to Shakespeare, ‘that man’s a bit too normal for my tastes’. Normal is from the Latin for a carpenter’s square – so, it basically meant right-angled. Knowing that original meaning might not fully explain what normal means, but I think it helps us to make a word we otherwise take for granted a little strange – and that that is a good thing.
This book does something like that the whole way through. The words selected are among the trickiest words in the English language (and in social theory) – we are talking ‘culture’, ‘democracy’, ‘communism’, ‘civilisation’, ‘romanticism’... But while Williams provides interesting etymologies of the words, he does much more than ‘just’ that. And that is because these words don’t really have a meaning – rather they have a series of contested meanings depending on who is using them. This is a similar point to the one above about the shaming of people who do not use the ‘standard’ version of the language.
This means that words that seem at first glance to be unequivocally good – say, realism or rationalism or idealism – become complicated and even soiled be association with certain theories. This is particularly true as our ideas broaden and develop over time so that what is wrought by these changes shift the meanings of otherwise innocuous or even positive words making them turn into their opposites.
Positivist is perhaps as good an example of this as any other to show the problems associated with what might otherwise seem unproblematic words. The word comes from Comte and originally meant ‘scientific’ or perhaps more ‘empirical’. This was a case of using the word for a philosophical position of arguing against a priori ideas – but it became increasingly associated with the idea of ‘if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist’ – which is so clearly nonsense that it probably seems inevitable that eventually positivism itself would struggle under the weight of this.
One of the distinctions Williams doesn’t bring up in the context of positivism is that it is often strongly contrasted with ‘normative’ – where ‘scientific theories’ are generally understood as wanting to be on the side of the positive, rather than on the side of the ‘normative’ – they want to be square, but not square by convention.
I think positivism works as a ‘scientific’ idea if what it is discussing is more about bicycles than rats – something I’ve stolen from someone I read a while ago. That is, positivism works where we can say ‘all things being equal’. For ‘all things being equal’ to be a reasonable thing to say implies that you can hold a single variable constant while you turn the other dial from side-to-side like a madman. Positivism works when you can take something apart, checking each of the bits you dismantle as you go so as to consider their independent value, and then, at your leisure, put the whole thing back together again. You know, like you can do with a bicycle. But not everything in the world is like a bicycle.
Some things are more like rats. And rats really don’t like it when you start dismantling them. Chop the leg off a rat and even if you are able to remove some of the arthritis from around the knee, the rat as a whole still isn’t going to thank you for it. And even if you stick the leg back on almost as quickly as you removed it, the rat still might die from the trauma. Complex systems don’t have independent ‘parts’ – all things simply aren’t ‘equal’. Even when you can, Humpty-Dumpty-like, put the pieces back together again, the system as a whole might never get back to being right-angled – or even normal.
I enjoyed this book, and I think it is still worth reading, even if it is getting a bit old, like the rest of us. And I learnt quite a lot along the way – things I hadn’t expected to learn.
For example, I used to teach a subject on curriculum studies and would tell people that the three main ideas you need to learn in educational theory are curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – I stole (always steal, never borrow) this straight from Bernstein – but it is no less valuable for being stolen. Anyway, each of these words has a curious etymology. Pedagogy is from Greek for someone who accompanies a child – literally, ‘a boy guide’. Assessment is from Latin for ‘to sit beside’. Curriculum is also from Latin but it means ‘running track’. In this book, Williams tells me that ‘Career’ is from the same root as curriculum – which had never occurred to me. All of which made me wonder if the current shifts in how we work and study will encourage us to stop using ‘career’ and ‘curriculum’ – since ‘fixed courses’ is about as close to the opposite of what we will be facing as it is possible to think of.
In his section on Labour he quotes something my mother has told me for most of my life, that the Bible tells us we live for three-score-and-ten years – something she fortunately seems to have forgotten since turning 70. It seems the Bible does say that, except what she never told me was that the Bible also effectively says ‘and that’s when you should die or bad stuff is about to happen’. The whole quote is: "The days of our years are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow." (Psalm 90:10) Basically, live until you are 70, and all will be good – live until you are 80 and you might have preferred to have died at 70.
I bought this book years ago in a church hall when I was on the way to see a friend and had some time to kill. I meant to read it at the time, but you know how these things work out. All the same, I think it would have been a better book for me to have read in my 20s than 50s.
Before I end, I want to stress something that Williams also stresses in this little book. He certainly isn’t saying that if we are only able to gain consensus, to achieve consistent definitions of the words we use, then all (or even most or even many) of our disputes will simply fall away. He is also not saying the opposite of this – that the meanings of words are completely relative and depend purely on who is using the words. Rather I think he is saying that trying to understand what the person you are talking to might mean when they use certain words may not resolve the disagreements between you both – but that it is unlikely to make matters worse – and that’s probably as close to a good thing as we can hope for.
This can all sound a bit like mystical nonsense, but I don’t mean it to. And I also don’t want it to sound like I’m saying something even more snobby, even if I suspect that the snobby meaning might hold more truth – that is, that knowing the etymology of words is something likely to be more available to certain classes than it is to ‘the rest of us’ and so ‘they’ are able to understand the nuance of meanings better than ‘we’ are. I think learning the etymology of words complicates their meanings, showing shades of meaning we might not have otherwise notice.
But Williams is particularly opposed to this idea in its most boldly stated form. He points out that the idea people can speak their own native language all of their lives, and yet not be understood to be able to speak it ‘properly’ is one of the most obnoxious versions of class shaming imaginable. And I totally agree – but I also think learning the genealogy of words brings ideas to life in ways it is hard to achieve otherwise.
Word origins and their shifts in meaning can give us a strange sense of vertigo. Recently, I learnt that ‘normal’ only came into the English language in the mid-17th century. That means that Shakespeare never referred to anyone as ‘normal’ – in fact, for that sense of the word you had to wait until the early 19th century (I think you needed to wait for statistics to become a thing). Imagine not being able to say to Shakespeare, ‘that man’s a bit too normal for my tastes’. Normal is from the Latin for a carpenter’s square – so, it basically meant right-angled. Knowing that original meaning might not fully explain what normal means, but I think it helps us to make a word we otherwise take for granted a little strange – and that that is a good thing.
This book does something like that the whole way through. The words selected are among the trickiest words in the English language (and in social theory) – we are talking ‘culture’, ‘democracy’, ‘communism’, ‘civilisation’, ‘romanticism’... But while Williams provides interesting etymologies of the words, he does much more than ‘just’ that. And that is because these words don’t really have a meaning – rather they have a series of contested meanings depending on who is using them. This is a similar point to the one above about the shaming of people who do not use the ‘standard’ version of the language.
This means that words that seem at first glance to be unequivocally good – say, realism or rationalism or idealism – become complicated and even soiled be association with certain theories. This is particularly true as our ideas broaden and develop over time so that what is wrought by these changes shift the meanings of otherwise innocuous or even positive words making them turn into their opposites.
Positivist is perhaps as good an example of this as any other to show the problems associated with what might otherwise seem unproblematic words. The word comes from Comte and originally meant ‘scientific’ or perhaps more ‘empirical’. This was a case of using the word for a philosophical position of arguing against a priori ideas – but it became increasingly associated with the idea of ‘if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist’ – which is so clearly nonsense that it probably seems inevitable that eventually positivism itself would struggle under the weight of this.
One of the distinctions Williams doesn’t bring up in the context of positivism is that it is often strongly contrasted with ‘normative’ – where ‘scientific theories’ are generally understood as wanting to be on the side of the positive, rather than on the side of the ‘normative’ – they want to be square, but not square by convention.
I think positivism works as a ‘scientific’ idea if what it is discussing is more about bicycles than rats – something I’ve stolen from someone I read a while ago. That is, positivism works where we can say ‘all things being equal’. For ‘all things being equal’ to be a reasonable thing to say implies that you can hold a single variable constant while you turn the other dial from side-to-side like a madman. Positivism works when you can take something apart, checking each of the bits you dismantle as you go so as to consider their independent value, and then, at your leisure, put the whole thing back together again. You know, like you can do with a bicycle. But not everything in the world is like a bicycle.
Some things are more like rats. And rats really don’t like it when you start dismantling them. Chop the leg off a rat and even if you are able to remove some of the arthritis from around the knee, the rat as a whole still isn’t going to thank you for it. And even if you stick the leg back on almost as quickly as you removed it, the rat still might die from the trauma. Complex systems don’t have independent ‘parts’ – all things simply aren’t ‘equal’. Even when you can, Humpty-Dumpty-like, put the pieces back together again, the system as a whole might never get back to being right-angled – or even normal.
I enjoyed this book, and I think it is still worth reading, even if it is getting a bit old, like the rest of us. And I learnt quite a lot along the way – things I hadn’t expected to learn.
For example, I used to teach a subject on curriculum studies and would tell people that the three main ideas you need to learn in educational theory are curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – I stole (always steal, never borrow) this straight from Bernstein – but it is no less valuable for being stolen. Anyway, each of these words has a curious etymology. Pedagogy is from Greek for someone who accompanies a child – literally, ‘a boy guide’. Assessment is from Latin for ‘to sit beside’. Curriculum is also from Latin but it means ‘running track’. In this book, Williams tells me that ‘Career’ is from the same root as curriculum – which had never occurred to me. All of which made me wonder if the current shifts in how we work and study will encourage us to stop using ‘career’ and ‘curriculum’ – since ‘fixed courses’ is about as close to the opposite of what we will be facing as it is possible to think of.
In his section on Labour he quotes something my mother has told me for most of my life, that the Bible tells us we live for three-score-and-ten years – something she fortunately seems to have forgotten since turning 70. It seems the Bible does say that, except what she never told me was that the Bible also effectively says ‘and that’s when you should die or bad stuff is about to happen’. The whole quote is: "The days of our years are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow." (Psalm 90:10) Basically, live until you are 70, and all will be good – live until you are 80 and you might have preferred to have died at 70.
I bought this book years ago in a church hall when I was on the way to see a friend and had some time to kill. I meant to read it at the time, but you know how these things work out. All the same, I think it would have been a better book for me to have read in my 20s than 50s.
Before I end, I want to stress something that Williams also stresses in this little book. He certainly isn’t saying that if we are only able to gain consensus, to achieve consistent definitions of the words we use, then all (or even most or even many) of our disputes will simply fall away. He is also not saying the opposite of this – that the meanings of words are completely relative and depend purely on who is using the words. Rather I think he is saying that trying to understand what the person you are talking to might mean when they use certain words may not resolve the disagreements between you both – but that it is unlikely to make matters worse – and that’s probably as close to a good thing as we can hope for.
July 23, 2011
Only Raymond Williams could write what amounts to an enjoyable dictionary. Though the book isn't necessarily meant to be read cover to cover, my "project" of reading one letter a day over the past month has been an enlightening, engaging, and sometimes surprising one. More generally, Williams' impulse in writing this has to be praised. Originally an appendix to Culture and Society, what became Keywords was then so massive he decided to publish it separately. As always, in disentangling the meaning of terms and concepts that are often taken for granted, Williams hopes to problematize our understandings of meaning. He insists that his is not a project, in fact, about meaning. Rather, it is about meanings (plural), which -- when unpacked and made visible -- do not bring about resolution but "just that extra edge of consciousness" (p.24). At its most basic level, that is exactly what this book is -- simultaneously and meditation and enumeration of the evolving contingencies of language that encourages us to see the connection between words and ideology.
April 7, 2010
A personal, Anglocentric, left and lit-crit focused dictionary of 110 terms, ranging from ‘Aesthetic’ to ‘Work,’ each given one to eight pages of etymological, political and cultural history reaching occasionally beyond the 16th century but with emphasis on current (as of 1976), 18th, 19th and mid 20th century usage.
Each small essay works quickly through the turns (according to Williams) of history with its own idiosyncratic shorthand and in a manner that though regularly illuminating often, perhaps because of Williams’ unqualified abbreviation, sows hints of doubt as to the depth and full trustworthiness of its historical research.
As an instance, the entry for ‘Socialist’ (five pages) runs through the word’s emergence in “eC19” (early 19th century), through alternate terms (mutualist, associationist, phalansterian), the changing uses of socialist and communist up to and beyond the Bolshevik revolution, a similar history of ‘Anarchism,’ and then, quickly, notes on ‘Militant,’ ‘Nihilist,’ and finally ‘Left,’ ‘lefty’ and ‘leftism.’ The book’s longest entry seems to be on ‘Class.’
A work in Williams’ manner, but tuned to the turns of 21st century American usage (‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘populist,’ etc.) might be enlightening – more so, I would hope (or at least less pretentiously), than the 2005 collaborative reworking of “Keywords,” Blackwell Publishing’s “New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society,” an unsatisfying creature of the cultural studies world Williams helped engender.
December 24, 2012
مالدي هو ترجمة نعيمان عثمان
دار المركز الثقافي العربي
وهويحمل اشارات لللعديد من الكلمات الانجليزية ونا صاحبها من تغير دلالي عبر التاريخ وسبب ذلك التحول
قد يكون الكتاب لغويا
الى انه ثري بمعلومات تاريخية ايضا
حين يتعرض لسبب اشتقاق الكلمات من اللاتينية
ومتى كان ظهور ذات الكلمة
مثلا
حين يتعرض لكلمة فرد Individual
يوضح اصل المعنى الذي وضعت له
وكيف تم اشتقاقها من كلمة لاتينية وسطى
ثم متى استخدمة كمفردة لترجمة كلمة يونانية
يذكرها المؤلف ومعناها
واين يوجد معناها
يشير الى وجودها بمعنى متحول في الجدل الثيولوجي القروسطي خاصة في ما يتعلق ب وحدة الثالوث
وكذلك معناها في خطاب الكنيسة الكاثلوكية
مع تدعيم الترجمة بالجمل الانجليزية المهمة في الاصل
ثم يعرض لتطور معنى الكلمة في خطابات علماء ومفكرين
ويتنقل بين الفيزياء والبيلوجيا الحديثة والاثر النغير في الخطابات السياسية
الكناب ثري جدا للمهتم باللغة والتاريخ
وان كان يخلو من الاثارة في صياغته
March 21, 2016
part leftist glossary, part sustained argument, if all the q.v. notices are followed with rigor.
January 9, 2019
A list of definitions (and etymologies) of the vague, overloaded, and pompous language used in the humanities. Reading this early in my degree made me able to talk: it relaxed the paralysis that is the natural (and perhaps intended) response to their famous walls of jargon.
If you've ever felt there was something to area studies and critical theory, but that the inferential distance was too costly to justify the effort, this is the book for you. (Or, it was thirty years ago. They'll have invented thousands more ill-defined words since then.) I imagine it would also be good for very ambitious adult English learners.
Williams is a sarcastic, clever and friendly guide: I can't remember which top-rank word he describes as "better for it never to have been", but here's a good entry:
If you've ever felt there was something to area studies and critical theory, but that the inferential distance was too costly to justify the effort, this is the book for you. (Or, it was thirty years ago. They'll have invented thousands more ill-defined words since then.) I imagine it would also be good for very ambitious adult English learners.
Williams is a sarcastic, clever and friendly guide: I can't remember which top-rank word he describes as "better for it never to have been", but here's a good entry:
'Nature' is perhaps the most complex word in the language. It is relatively easy to distinguish three areas of meaning:
(i) the essential quantity and character of something;
(ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both;
(iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.
Yet it is evident that within (ii) and (iii), though the area of reference is broadly clear, precise meanings are variable and at times even opposed. The historical development of the word through these three senses is important, but it is also significant that all three senses, and the main variations and alternatives within the two most difficult of them, are still active and widespread in contemporary usage. was (i), the essential character and quality of something. Nature is thus one of several important words, including culture, which began as descriptions of a quality or process, immediately defined by a specific reference, but later became independent nouns...
The common phrase human nature, often crucial in important kinds of argument, can contain, without clearly demonstrating it, any of the three main senses and indeed the main variations and alternatives. There is a relatively neutral use in sense (i): that it is an essential quality and characteristic of human beings to do something (though the something that is specified may of course be controversial). But in many uses the descriptive (and hence verifiable or falsifiable) character of sense (i) is less prominent than the very different kind of statement which depends on sense (ii), the directing inherent force, or one of the variants of sense (iii), a fixed property of the material world, in this case ‘natural man’. What has also to be noticed in the relation between sense (i) and senses (ii) and (iii) is, more generally, that sense (i), by definition, is a specific singular - the nature of something, whereas senses (ii) and (iii), in almost all their uses, are abstract singulars - the nature of all things having become singular nature or Nature...
There was then a practice of shifting use, as in Shakespeare’s Lear:Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s ...
one daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse
Which twain have brought her to.
That nature, which contemns its origin
Cannot be border’d certain in itself...
It could seem wrong to inquire into the workings of an absolute monarch, or of a minister of God. But a formula was arrived at: to understand the creation was to praise the Creator, seeing absolute power through contingent works. In practice the formula became lip-service and was then forgotten. Paralleling political changes, nature was altered from an absolute to a constitutional monarch, with a new kind of emphasis on natural laws. Nature, in C18 and C19, was often in effect personified as a constitutional lawyer. The laws came from somewhere, and this was variously but often indifferently defined; most practical attention was given to interpreting and classifying the laws, making predictions from precedents, discovering or reviving forgotten statutes, and above all shaping new laws from new cases: nature not as an inherent and shaping force but as an accumulation and classification of cases.
The complexity of the word is hardly surprising, given the fundamental importance of the processes to which it refers. But since nature is a word which carries, over a very long period, many of the major variations of human thought - often, in any particular use, only implicitly yet with powerful effect on the character of the argument - it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty.
April 6, 2022
Before reading this book I never thought about how words evolve in different languages, and that these individual trajectories influence one another. Before reading this book I also never thought about how the meaning of a single word (such as culture or civilization) could be so influential. Even so, i probably shouldn’t have selected cultural studies as a minor field in graduate school. When they said it was an “anti-discipline” I should have folded.
March 22, 2017
i love raymond williams, he is a lad, what a champ.
May 11, 2019
If you've ever felt confused by the seeming under-definition but over-use of political words like "liberal", "socialist", and "bourgeois"; or wondered why exactly certain flavors or mechanisms of philosophy like "pragmatism", "empiricism", "dialectic", or "rationality" are named the way they are, and how that change has happened throughout time, or how sometimes conflicting uses are exploited for specific rhetorical purposes, then this is your book.
Personally I am a science major and lawyer, who is now taking the time in his 40s to start reading a lot more books in the humanities. Having Williams' book is an expansion of words that are often used without having been explained, and he does a very excellent job of giving precision to these terms that are often ubiquitous within the humanities but not within the common language. Or perhaps worse, they are in common language, but have a different meaning as within particular domains of the humanities. Although it was written in 1976, and is based deeply on the Oxford English Dictionary (which is itself more of a historical then-current document for purposes of etymology, as Williams himself explains) this is still a deeply valuable book in 2019 because you have to get caught up on what these words meant throughout time, which influences how they are used in the present day.
If words are tools that we used to make sense of and communicate about the world, then this book is a meta-tool for inspecting those tools. And perhaps sharpening them in some cases; but more often just realizing upon inspection that some words are just irredeemably blunt after centuries of conflicting use and abuse.
Personally I am a science major and lawyer, who is now taking the time in his 40s to start reading a lot more books in the humanities. Having Williams' book is an expansion of words that are often used without having been explained, and he does a very excellent job of giving precision to these terms that are often ubiquitous within the humanities but not within the common language. Or perhaps worse, they are in common language, but have a different meaning as within particular domains of the humanities. Although it was written in 1976, and is based deeply on the Oxford English Dictionary (which is itself more of a historical then-current document for purposes of etymology, as Williams himself explains) this is still a deeply valuable book in 2019 because you have to get caught up on what these words meant throughout time, which influences how they are used in the present day.
If words are tools that we used to make sense of and communicate about the world, then this book is a meta-tool for inspecting those tools. And perhaps sharpening them in some cases; but more often just realizing upon inspection that some words are just irredeemably blunt after centuries of conflicting use and abuse.
Read
December 30, 2024Not the most contemporary but brings up a lot of points of ambiguity in words' meanings and usages that remain relevant. The 2015 Oxford University Press edition is very poorly copyedited; I would recommend reading a different one.
October 26, 2018
I miss Ricky the Rock.
March 3, 2010
A must own for students of philosophy or the history of critical thought. Most of the words discussed are heavy nouns, like "culture" and "radical." Williams discusses how the usage of such words has changed over time in a way that imbues them with poetic power.
January 20, 2008
Pretty readable for, you know, a glossary.
November 28, 2008
Raymond Williams is cultural studies what Eddie Van Halen is to two-handed tappers!
March 16, 2023
A lovely wee book that I wish I'd read when I was younger. It's a fairly intensive scroll through the etymology of words that are, mostly, hotly contested.
That might not sound like the most exciting read but there's a whole load of contested politics and philosophy that are revealed through this. Anyone who's studied philosophy or has had the misfortune to sit next to such a person in a pub has been through the subjective / objective argument, but having it played out here in a less invested, more descriptive fashion, is really interesting. Likewise the (predictably sexist) origins of 'sex' are fascinating - and give credence to notions that women were not considered fully human, at least in terms of language usage, for a long time.
It's probably one of those toilet reads - pick up, read a few pages. Definitely a strong appeal to people who are interested in linguistics, but it's also very approachable - a suitable present for a geeky uncle. Or, in fact, anyone who's unaware of how language reflects politics and philosophy.
I don't know how much of the assiduous research Williams has done will have changed in the interceding (near) half-century - certainly the methods of determining etymology and the availability of sources has exploded - but I don't think there's anything in this book which is glaringly wrong or misleading or lacking for contemporary research methods (it's not my area, mind you). Definitely a charmer and worth seeking out.
That might not sound like the most exciting read but there's a whole load of contested politics and philosophy that are revealed through this. Anyone who's studied philosophy or has had the misfortune to sit next to such a person in a pub has been through the subjective / objective argument, but having it played out here in a less invested, more descriptive fashion, is really interesting. Likewise the (predictably sexist) origins of 'sex' are fascinating - and give credence to notions that women were not considered fully human, at least in terms of language usage, for a long time.
It's probably one of those toilet reads - pick up, read a few pages. Definitely a strong appeal to people who are interested in linguistics, but it's also very approachable - a suitable present for a geeky uncle. Or, in fact, anyone who's unaware of how language reflects politics and philosophy.
I don't know how much of the assiduous research Williams has done will have changed in the interceding (near) half-century - certainly the methods of determining etymology and the availability of sources has exploded - but I don't think there's anything in this book which is glaringly wrong or misleading or lacking for contemporary research methods (it's not my area, mind you). Definitely a charmer and worth seeking out.
August 3, 2022
I really didn't know what to expect with this book. Williams is, of course, a touchstone of cultural studies, and so I've spent some time with his classic arguments and articles and so thought that maybe this was a bit more of the same, albeit in condensed form--concise definitions of key terms in cultural studies and scholarship, formed together in a collection to maximize their use/usefulness. Instead, the philological and historical work that Williams puts into this curious collection is so much more and honestly kind of more interesting. The deep range of historical references and the careful tracing of terminological evolutions was fascinating to read through, and the times that Williams offers commentary on those changes and their significance was absolutely wonderful. Overall, I learned a lot about the evolution of language and the evolution of culture with respect to language. My one wish would have been for more of Williams's own thoughts and commentary amidst the larger historical project, but I also understand that at least some of that was beyond the purview of the project itself.
February 7, 2025
مقرفة قراءة الترجمة، وإن كان جهد مشكور من الدكتور نعيمان عثمان-ولكنه أقدم على خطوة غير محسوبة بمحاولته ترجمة الكتاب. لا أعرف لماذا ترجم بعض المصطلحات للعربية بالشكل المستغرب هذا. مثل:
الكلمات المفاتيح بدلا من الكلمات المفتاحية keywords ب
وalienation الى الاستلاب بدلا من الابعاد او العزل
وكيف جرأ أن يترجم الأناركية anarchism إلى الفوضوية وهو أستاذ الأدب الإنجليزي
وfolks إلى "فولك/شعب" بالله عليك يادكتور!!
والأدق بلا شك هي "قوم"
والنجمتين:
نصف نجمة لمقدمة نعيمان عثمان
ونجمة ونصف لمقدمة الأستاذ السيد طلال أسد
الكلمات المفاتيح بدلا من الكلمات المفتاحية keywords ب
وalienation الى الاستلاب بدلا من الابعاد او العزل
وكيف جرأ أن يترجم الأناركية anarchism إلى الفوضوية وهو أستاذ الأدب الإنجليزي
وfolks إلى "فولك/شعب" بالله عليك يادكتور!!
والأدق بلا شك هي "قوم"
والنجمتين:
نصف نجمة لمقدمة نعيمان عثمان
ونجمة ونصف لمقدمة الأستاذ السيد طلال أسد
October 2, 2022
I only read this for a school assignment. I loved the concept and loved working with this book for the project. But I can't say I enjoyed reading it. It get's kind of boring to read. But It is really nice to read in parts. I think I would've enjoyed it more if I where to read it in parts and not in the fast manner I did read it. Also English is not my first language that may be part of the frustration.
January 26, 2019
Fascinating but dry. Deeply researched and explained. Worth revisiting
From the description of NATURE:
"What can be seen as an uncertainty, was also a tension: nature was at once innocent, unprovided, sure, unsure, fruitful, destructive, a pure force and tainted and cursed. The real complexity of natural processes has been rendered by a complexity within the single term.
From the description of NATURE:
"What can be seen as an uncertainty, was also a tension: nature was at once innocent, unprovided, sure, unsure, fruitful, destructive, a pure force and tainted and cursed. The real complexity of natural processes has been rendered by a complexity within the single term.
August 10, 2020
I’ve learned by now that when Raymond Williams says that a word is one of the “most difficult” in the English language what he really means is that it’s one of the most difficult for him. Difficulty is particular to the subject. No hate though, the book is lively and quite interesting.
June 22, 2024
Raymond Williams' influential work, **Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society**, delves into the intricate meanings of words in social discourse. By tracing the historical development of terms like "family," Williams reveals their socially constructed nature. Language, he argues, is not fixed or natural but shaped by cultural contexts. His critical analysis contributes significantly to literary theory and prompts us to examine language critically.
In summary, **Keywords** denaturalizes language, exposing its ideological underpinnings and emphasizing the need for context-aware interpretation. Williams remains pivotal in the field of literary criticism and critical theory since the 1970s . 📚🔍
In summary, **Keywords** denaturalizes language, exposing its ideological underpinnings and emphasizing the need for context-aware interpretation. Williams remains pivotal in the field of literary criticism and critical theory since the 1970s . 📚🔍
October 1, 2017
One of those books whose bibliography genuinely interested me.
June 29, 2019
An excellent look at how to facilitate the discussion of vocabulary in context with the historical developments of society and culture.
July 3, 2019
通过词汇的词源学、文学的探索，将文化与社会阐释的十分透彻。大学时在图书馆认真读过这本书。
August 5, 2019
A word a day keeps the doctor away...What a fine and interesting cultural vocabulary!
Read
November 17, 2020*lit theories*
Read
November 24, 2021A bit of Bayle, a bit of Benjamin, bucketloads of Raymond Williams. Who would have thought you can write what essentially amounts to a conceptual history dictionary?
desk-reference
July 5, 2022Acquired 1998 or 1999
McGill Bookstore, Montreal, Quebec
McGill Bookstore, Montreal, Quebec
August 28, 2022
idk how I've never come this til now! it's very 1976, sure, but when read as a primary source it's fabulous
April 3, 2023
Literally a dictionary of keywords. Some were useful, interesting premise, more in depth on a few concepts than traditional dictionaries.
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