Four ways of looking at a keyword: introduction

Adamson, Sylvia and Durant, Alan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5208-4718 (2007) Four ways of looking at a keyword: introduction. Critical Quarterly, 49 (1) . pp. 1-5. ISSN 0011-1562 [Article] (doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.2007.00772.x)

Abstract

This article introduces four essays, published in a special issue of CQ, which attempt to implement a research programme in historical semantics inspired by Raymond Williams’s 'Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society', 1976/1983. Following brief discussion of questions of approach and method, each of the four essays is described: Katie Wales updates Williams’s 'Keywords' entry for ‘media’; Daniel Karlin examines ‘want’, by reference to Elvis Costello's song ‘I want you’; Philip Durkin brings his OED expertise to bear on ‘personal’ and ‘personality’; and Kathryn Allan examines ‘excellence’ and ‘excellent’, including their now frequent use by universities in documents such as mission statements. The essay ends with wider observations about interaction between the fields of literature, linguistics, and an older and unduly neglected disciplinary category: philology.

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