Ben Zimmer on Keywords
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Christine Oh, "Wolf Humanities Center hosts linguist, columnist Ben Zimmer for lecture on 'keywords'", The Daily Pennsylvanian 10/11/2024:
The Wolf Humanities Center hosted Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer at the ARCH building for a talk titled “Lexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age: On the Trail of Keywords and their Cultural Worlds” on Oct. 9.
Zimmer — who was a research associate at Penn’s former Institute for Research in Cognitive Science from 2005 to 2006 — gave a presentation on lexicology and linguistics followed by a question and answer session with roughly 40 attendees. The event drew a crowd of linguists and language enthusiasts from Penn's campus and the Philadelphia area.
Zimmer’s talk examined the origins of keywords, which he defined as “broad categorical terms with contested meanings.” He emphasized that keywords often become politically charged, and he takes cues to write about ones that are repeated in the news.
“Words in our language are constantly open to reinterpretation and re-signification,” Zimmer said.
Zimmer described his approach to writing language columns as “a form of narrative lexicography, telling stories about words from their origins to how they moved through various cultural, social, and political worlds.”
Throughout the event, Zimmer referenced the novel “Keywords” by Welsh writer Raymond Williams, which he cited as being particularly influential in his career with its synthesis of lexicology, linguistics, and culture. […]
Zimmer’s lecture was an installment in the Wolf Humanities Center’s “Forum on Keywords” program. Led by South Asia Studies professor Lisa Mitchell, the forum aims to explore the interdisciplinary study of mobile concepts and their evolving meanings across time, languages, and contexts. The center combines public events and seminars to investigate how keywords reflect historical forces, such as migration, colonization, and resistance, and consider the development of new lexicons in response to changing identities and fields of knowledge.
The Zoom version of Ben's talk was recorded, and I'll post a link to the recording if I can. The talk's abstract:
When Raymond Williams published Keywords in 1976, his reflections on culturally significant words were largely informed by entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, an early inspiration for Williams came from looking up the OED entry for culture and seeing how the word's usage shifted over time. Nowadays, lexical sleuths who seek to understand a word's historical trajectory can take advantage of vast digital databases of books and newspapers, as well as other online troves of language use. We can now more fully appreciate the social, cultural, and political pathways of a keyword by following the trail of "text-artifacts" that it leaves behind.
The Keyword Forum's focus resonates with some keyword-adjacent aspects of Ben's academic background in anthropological linguistics. He spent a couple of years doing fieldwork in Java, with a special focus on "the methods by which Sundanese Muslims read, recite, translate, and interpret Qur'ânic Arabic", as reported in his 2000 paper "Al-'Arābīyah and Basa Sunda: Ideologies of Translation and Interpretation among the Muslim of West Java":
[T]he doctrine of Qur'ânic untranslatability raises new questions for scholars of Islamic discourse in non-Arab lands. First, to what extent does the localization and interpretation of Arabic allow the language of the Qur'ân to become "domesticated," and to what extent does it remain distant? Second, how have local interpretive methods of metalinguistic "glossing" been employed to explicate Qur'ânic Arabic word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, or ayat-by-ayat? And lastly, how has this exegetic power been socially distributed in local hierarchies at different historical junctures and in different cultural milieux?
Victor Mair said,
October 11, 2024 @ 7:24 am
I was present at Ben's lecture from afar (Nampa, Idaho), and was prompted by it to entertain the following thought (immersed in AI Overview [AIO] as I am these days), "Here we see genuine human cognition at work. AIO cannot compare."
Brian Ogilvie said,
October 11, 2024 @ 8:24 am
I note that the student journalist who wrote the piece uses “novel” to refer to Williams’s keywords. I have a hunch that for many, if not most, students, “novel” is a residual category for any book that isn’t a textbook.
Philip Taylor said,
October 11, 2024 @ 10:25 am
I don't know if it is significant, Brian, but the journalist was writing of Williams’ novel Keywords, not Williams’ novel (= of a new kind or nature; not previously imagined or thought of; (now) esp. interestingly new or unusual) keywords.
Markonsea said,
October 11, 2024 @ 11:24 am
I read it the way you did, Philip, and I was sufficiently intrigued to look it up on Amazon.
“Raymond Williams’ seminal exploration of the meaning of some of the most important words in the English language.
“First published in 1976, and expanded in 1983, KEYWORDS reveals how the meanings of 131 words – including ‘art’, ‘class’, ‘family’, ‘media’, ‘sex’ and ‘tradition’ – were formed and subsequently altered and redefined as the historical contexts in which they were used changed.
“Neither a defining dictionary or glossary, KEYWORDS is rather a brilliant investigation into how the meanings of some of the most important words in the English language have shifted over time, and the forces that brought about those shifts.”
Novel, then, but not a novel.
Philip Taylor said,
October 11, 2024 @ 11:40 am
Agreed — I really should have investigated (as you did) before posting …
CuConnacht said,
October 11, 2024 @ 1:56 pm
I have seen "novel" used to mean "book" before, and somewhat similarly, "song" used to mean "piece of music" (vocal or not).
ardj said,
October 11, 2024 @ 3:41 pm
At first puzzled by these "mobile concepts", the phrase seems to mean "concepts that can be shared, or at least found in more than one cultural (national ? and so on) environment, not just the sort of nonsensical symbols that seem to creep into text messaging, for instance, or the very idea of a portable telephone or of travel or ….
I am now puzzled to think of some "immobile concepts", perhaps it is too late at night.
Victor Mair said,
October 11, 2024 @ 4:13 pm
I just heard an Idaho radio station exhort its listeners to keep their ears open for "keywords". If they hear one and phone it in, they can win a contest. Presumably, the station announced ahead of time a list of what these keywords are.
Brian Ogilvie said,
October 11, 2024 @ 6:38 pm
Philip, I meant to capitalize Keywords. I think autocorrect "fixed" my "mistake." I wasn't aware one could use HTML in comments, or I would have italicized it too. I first encountered Keywords in one of my graduate seminars. There's a successor of sorts, an edited volume titled New Keywords, which is more detailed but also more jargony and less accessible to non-academic readers than Williams's original.
JPL said,
October 11, 2024 @ 6:48 pm
The expression, in the article quoted in the OP, "the novel "Keywords"" refers to a book, not to words. A more appropriate usage, in the usage established by previous generations of speakers, would have been "the book "Keywords"", since the book in question is apparently not fiction, but a nonfiction monograph. As Brian Ogilvie above suspects, 'novel' (N) may be a key word whose denotation is changing. If such novel referents for the lexeme 'novel' (N) are generally accepted, the integrating principle for the category will have to be (implicitly) adjusted in the process. (Apparently reading novels may not be as important an activity for younger generations as it was for previous ones.(I would not yet agree with this claim.))
Since the term 'keyword' as used by Raymond Williams does not seem to refer to terms used to narrow internet searches, the question arises, what does the author mean to refer to with his usage of the word 'keyword'? The description "broad categorical terms with contested meanings" is way too broad. As they say, how do you delimit this category? Since all "words in our language are constantly open to reinterpretation and resignification", at least in principle, what's so special about these ones? Is the process through which these words change historically different from that undergone by words in general? Again, "culturally significant" is way too broad. (Maybe the idea is that we can identify certain lexemes as problematic in some interesting way.) (Maybe it would have been better for Mr Williams to have left it as "key words", since the objects of his interest do not yet form a coherent existing category.)
Brian Ogilvie said,
October 11, 2024 @ 7:01 pm
If I hadn't needed to run out the door for a meeting, I would have added in my initial comment that for most of my 27-years as a college teacher, I've had students who refer to nonfiction books, epic poems, and the like as "novels," especially, but not only, in general education courses that mostly enroll non-majors (I'm a historian). My impression is that it has become more common in the last decade. I suspect that it's because in high school, they encounter two kinds of books: textbooks in most courses, which have common features (synopses, study questions, etc.), and novels in their English courses. So anything that doesn't look like a textbook must be a novel. (I've had students refer to a Shakespeare play as a "novel," which supports my surmise.) If the author of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/?paymeter=hard-gate-email-test-1" this Atlantic article is to be believed, we may not have the problem in a few years, because fewer and fewer students actually read entire books in high school.
Brian Ogilvie said,
October 11, 2024 @ 7:02 pm
Ugh, sorry for that mess of an attempt to use an anchor link in my comment!
Brian Ogilvie said,
October 11, 2024 @ 7:05 pm
JPL: In Keywords, Williams explained himself thusly: "I called these words keywords in two connected senses: they are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought."
JPL said,
October 12, 2024 @ 1:00 am
@Brian O:
Maybe I need some examples, but those explanations don't help much.
I looked at the description of the "Forum on Keywords" linked in the OP, and it looks like the problem of getting clear about what phenomenon exactly people are interested in is bigger than I thought.
Your comment about today's students and their willingness to read was interesting, and fits with my observations as well. It's difficult to get students to read anything that's not in the phone. Here's a phenomenon worth puzzling about.