A word on lexicography



Caught in a web of words: James Murray, Oxford lexicographer



It would be a simple task to fill the Jekyll and Hyde Dictionary if the purpose were simply to point to words or phrases that had acquired annoyingly modish and vacuous usages, but that has never been the intention. The Dictionary attempts to identify words that in modern usage have simultaneously opposite or apparently conflicting meanings or connotations, neither of which we would wish to do without, but where we commonly have only one, or the other, in mind at any given time.

In that way it tries to illustrate a little the fascinating inter-relationship between thought and language, the ways in which each constricts or extends the other, and the ways in which we may enrich our thought by keeping alert to all the suggestions of the language we employ.

So the Dictionary is not intended as part of a campaign against annoying modern usages such as ‘going forward’ – and yet there is some area of overlap, and I wonder if it is entirely wise to tilt against some of the more serious examples of linguistic damage.

In a contribution I recently made to a furniture designer-makers’ forum I rather mocked the use of the word ‘iconic’ to describe a certain sort of design as the desired content of a future exhibition. The word has now sunk to the vocabulary of estate agents. It prompted me afterwards to search the Jekyll and Hyde papers and I found I was able to add another entry to my selection on this blog. It may or may not be connected to my mockery (but people are sensitive about these things) that the next post on that forum spoke of ‘major’ not ‘iconic’ pieces of furniture.

I suspect, however, that the contributor still has the same set of ideas in his head: he has merely sanitised his language. Words that embody concepts are used as shorthand, with a web of unarticulated ideas and thought assumptions behind them, mutually shared between author and reader or listener. ‘Iconic’ made a certain web clear, a web that exists, however much we may regret it, as a cultural phenomenon. To mock the word that identifiably expresses such debased thinking and to drive the ideas elsewhere, under cover of a less obviously perverted term such as ‘major’, may make the cultural assimilation of the web more likely.

Modish usages such as ‘iconic’ come with a pre-digested web of allusion; they are ponderous with stale meaning that has not life enough to interact with other words and phrases in the same discourse. That is what makes such terms so wearisome and annoying. Typically one follows another in a leaden accumulation. Such clotted thinking is addictive. At the opposite extreme lies Shakespearean language where startling coinages of words and usage interact with each other like quicksilver, each gaining its meaning from the context of the total expression. Meaning and thought is created by the new expression of language rather than words being press-ganged into the presentation of static and impoverished concepts.

pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air…