{"id":66463,"date":"2024-10-11T06:58:28","date_gmt":"2024-10-11T11:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=66463"},"modified":"2024-10-11T06:58:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T11:58:28","slug":"ben-zimmer-on-keywords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=66463","title":{"rendered":"Ben Zimmer on Keywords"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christine Oh, \"Wolf Humanities Center hosts linguist, columnist Ben Zimmer for lecture on 'keywords'<\/a>\", The Daily Pennsylvanian<\/em> 10\/11\/2024:<\/p>\n

The Wolf Humanities Center hosted Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer at the ARCH building for a talk titled \u201cLexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age: On the Trail of Keywords and their Cultural Worlds\u201d on Oct. 9.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zimmer \u2014 who was a research associate at Penn\u2019s former Institute for Research in Cognitive Science from 2005 to 2006 \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Zimmer\u2019s talk examined the origins of keywords, which he defined as \u201cbroad categorical terms with contested meanings.\u201d He emphasized that keywords often become politically charged, and he takes cues to write about ones that are repeated in the news.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWords in our language are constantly open to reinterpretation and re-signification,\u201d Zimmer said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zimmer described his approach to writing language columns as \u201ca form of narrative lexicography, telling stories about words from their origins to how they moved through various cultural, social, and political worlds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the event, Zimmer referenced the novel \u201cKeywords\u201d by Welsh writer Raymond Williams, which he cited as being particularly influential in his career with its synthesis of lexicology, linguistics, and culture. […]<\/span><\/p>\n

Zimmer\u2019s lecture was an installment in the Wolf Humanities Center\u2019s\u00a0\u201cForum on Keywords\u201d program<\/u><\/a>. 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When Raymond Williams published\u00a0Keywords<\/em>\u00a0in 1976, his reflections on culturally significant words were largely informed by entries in the\u00a0Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>. Indeed, an early inspiration for Williams came from looking up the OED entry for\u00a0culture<\/em>\u00a0and 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Keyword Forum<\/a>'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 <\/span>by <\/span>which <\/span>Sundanese <\/span>Muslims <\/span>read, recite, translate, <\/span>and <\/span>interpret Qur'\u00e2nic <\/span>Arabic\", as reported in his 2000 paper \"Al-'Ar\u0101b\u012byah and Basa Sunda: Ideologies of Translation and Interpretation among the Muslim of West Java<\/a>\":<\/p>\n

[T]he <\/span>doctrine of <\/span>Qur'\u00e2<\/span>nic <\/span>untranslatability raises new <\/span>questions for <\/span>scholars of Islamic <\/span>discourse in <\/span>non-Arab <\/span>lands. First, <\/span>to <\/span>what extent <\/span>does <\/span>the localization and <\/span>interpretation of <\/span>Arabic allow the language <\/span>of <\/span>the Qur'\u00e2<\/span>n to <\/span>become <\/span>\"domesticated,\" <\/span>and <\/span>to <\/span>what <\/span>extent <\/span>does <\/span>it <\/span>remain <\/span>distant? Second, <\/span>how <\/span>have local interpretive methods <\/span>of <\/span>metalinguistic \"glossing\" <\/span>been <\/span>employed <\/span>to <\/span>explicate <\/span>Qur'\u00e2<\/span>nic Arabic word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, <\/span>or ayat<\/em>-by-ayat<\/em>? And <\/span>lastly, <\/span>how <\/span>has <\/span>this <\/span>exegetic power <\/span>been socially <\/span>distributed in <\/span>local hierarchies at <\/span>different <\/span>historical junctures and <\/span>in <\/span>different cultural <\/span>milieux?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cLexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age: On the Trail of Keywords and their Cultural Worlds\u201d on Oct. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words-words-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66465,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66463\/revisions\/66465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}