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.