34.155, Review: Historical Linguistics, Language Documentation, Lexicography: Mugglestone (2021)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-155. Wed Jan 18 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.155, Review: Historical Linguistics, Language Documentation, Lexicography: Mugglestone (2021)

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Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:55:24
From: Lelija Socanac [lelijasocanac at gmail.com]
Subject: Writing a War of Words

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-1003.html

AUTHOR: Lynda  Mugglestone
TITLE: Writing a War of Words
SUBTITLE: Andrew Clark and the Search for Meaning in World War One
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac, University of Zagreb

SUMMARY

The Introduction provides information about the life and work of Andrew Clark
– ‘scholar, historian, antiquarian, rector of Great Leighs in Essex, and a
committed logophile’. First World War provided an impetus for two of Clark’s
impressive projects. The first was his diary of the war years in ninety-two
volumes containing around three million words:  it was one of the largest and
most comprehensive diaries ever kept in English history. The second was his
“Words in War-Time”, almost a hundred notebooks and files assembled between
1914 and 1919 and archived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. His wide-ranging
documentation, with annotations, frequency statements, and citational evidence
of lexical/semantic change during the Great War, along with frequent
comparisons to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was transferred to a
tagged and fully searchable database. This enabled new insights into Clark’s
interdisciplinary focus, his status as lexicographer, and the shifting
patterns of language and lexical history in a period of critical change, which
is the topic of this book.

Chapter 1:” Word-hoard: From History to Historical Principles” provides a
detailed overview of Clark’s work and the inception of his “Words in War-Time”
in August 1914.  Although his approach to language was innovative in many
respects, he also drew on the legacies of his long-standing involvement with
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as on earlier
models of both lexicography and historiography. The interrelationship between
history and language was in the forefront of a critical re-examination of
language change at the time. Prescriptive approach to language was gradually
giving way to evidence-based investigation in which change was seen as
embodied in the very nature of a living language. This was reflected in the
OED, whose purpose was evident in the commitment to historical principles and
historical method. Thus, chronologically ordered citations from every period
of the language were to exhibit the history of each word, so that each entry
was a lexical biography, a life-history of usage. Clark was included among the
‘critical readers’ for the OED, who helped in ‘the investigation of the
history of historical, legal, philosophical, scientific, and technical words’
(Weekley 1932). The OED had aimed to gather previously unregistered words in a
new ‘inventory’ of English.  Clark was extending the enquiry of this kind,
embarking on other documentary ventures to save some words from oblivion. He
made a careful record of any new word before it disappeared. Various forms of
experimentation were apparent in his approach. Spoken language was accorded
treatment and value parallel to that of written texts.  Newspapers gradually
became valid linguistic resources. Notebooks, which he started by 1912,
offered a space in which material that might otherwise be neglected or
forgotten could be documented and preserved. His early notebooks on language
were miscellanies. Soon, however, the war came to dominate his selection of
words.  His ‘Notes on English Words’ were followed by ‘English Words in
War-Time’, displaying an abundance of ‘war clippings’. Thematic notebooks
gradually also made their appearance, so that ‘Words in War-Time’ track the
war-time use of language under topical headings.  His well-established
interest in the history of English was translated into forms of representation
in which history and language history were enacted day by day. Thus, he was
already laying down the principles of an inventive form of short-term
historical lexicography in which detailed observation centers on current use,
irrespective of the potential longevity of forms or meanings recorded. His
careful shaping of the sources and methodologies that might be used in tracing
living language history is a significant aspect of his work. 

Chapter 2: “Reading into Words” explores Clark’s emphasis on non-canonicity
and diversity of voices and forms in which the development of English might be
told. Newspapers were exploited as multi-genre spaces in which letters,
diaries, advertising, alongside a range of other textual forms, commonly
appeared. Clark’s aim was to ‘(…) take stock of the English language as
presented to the great mass of the reading public’ and ‘to give a fairly full
statement…of English Words as they are found in common use during this war’
(Clark III, XXXIII). For Clark, reading was a process of careful scrutiny and
annotation, a documentary record of a world in flux, in which issues such as
censorship and propaganda also claimed careful attention. In times of war, no
news was allowed which could convey information of advantage to the enemy.
Other aspects of communicative regulation were prompted by the insistence on
the need to maintain morale while mobilizing support for the war. The ‘same’
viewpoint had to be secured across all publications. In the mainstream press,
any opposition to the war was presented as a position of weakness which had
pejorative effect. 

Chapter 3: “Doing One’s Bit: From Voluntary Endeavour to Conscription”
explores how patriotism and its visible performance was promoted via language.
The British understatement of ‘doing one’s bit’ was set against stereotypes of
German hyperbole and excess. The ‘volunteer’ and ‘voluntary enlistment’ were a
prime means by which ‘one’s bit’ was done in the early war years. Unlike other
European nations, Britain had at first rejected conscription, relying instead
on a relatively small professional army, the British Expeditionary Force,
alongside the reserve and territorial forces.  In 1914-15, ordinary civilians
became citizen soldiers by voluntary enlistment. It was only in 1916 that the
Military Service Act rendered voluntary enlistment obsolete. At the time, the
discourse of identity, hegemonic masculinity (and its failure or rejection)
was prevalent. Across private and public use, meanings emerged in which
military performance was validated as a critical aspect of being a man. Women
could volunteer by taking a man’s place in the world of work while indirectly
also compelling men to volunteer to fight. The conscientious objector, on the
other hand, was rendered voiceless.

Chapter 4:” The Langscape of War” analyzes how Clark documented the ways in
which an aggressively modern war took shape in language. On one level, Clark’s
notebooks can provide a detailed history of nomenclature, a living reference
guide to how conflict was re-conceptualized and understood. Elsewhere,
however, they can direct attention to the realities of life at the front,
refract the relationships of ally and enemy, or record the ways in which
‘doing war’ was expressed in early twentieth-century use.  

Chapter 5: “Border Crossings” deals with other distinctive aspects of the war:
language and language barriers were, from the beginning, remarkably topical,
informing new patterns of purism, as well as new forms of contact. The war was
a strikingly polyglot affair. Although French had a special prominence across
a diverse range of war-time registers, words from Indian English, Flemish,
Serbian, or Russian were equally worthy of note and were signs of new forms of
solidarity.  They signaled ways by which language, in popular perception,
articulated visible bonds within and between different nations. Cultural
translation from Russian, for instance, was a prominent feature of
contemporary ‘Russomania’, evident in literature, music, and education.
Articles and advertisements in the British press appeared in Flemish or
French, directly addressing the shifting constitution of the Home Front in the
wake of the war. In contrast, distinctive forms of logophobia with reference
to the language of the enemy generated a set of highly divisive language
tactics in which linguistic and moral inversion were intentionally aligned.
Ethnonyms, as ‘chronicles of historical situations’ offered, in linguistic
form, ‘the symbolism of stereotyping and prejudice’ (Allen 1983).

Chapter 6: “English in a Time of Total War” explores Clark’s efforts to
document the diverse acts of assimilation, diffusion, and appropriation which
featured in the language of the nation state, whether in the commodification
of military diction in contemporary advertising or the transferred discourse
of trench warfare within the circumstances of domestic life. War impacted on
civilian existence in many ways. The erosion of Britain’s ‘ocean-guarded’
state repeatedly claimed attention as did the diverse materialities (and
attendant forms of linguistic expression) which arose in response to the war
in the air.

Chapter 7: “Writing the Woman’s Part” explores Clark’s pursuit of words and
meanings by which women’s participation in the war was expressed. Popular
representations of women in war could invoke images of suffering and passive
victimhood for which masculine protection was needed. In 1915 Virginia Woolf
lamented the ‘silent, unrepresented life’ that women faced. However, as
reserves of available manpower were gradually depleted, women took on new
roles as ‘war workers’, which resulted in the ‘feminization’ of crucial
sectors of the war-time workforce (Grayzel 2012: 267). Women as ‘war workers’
claimed a new linguistic visibility evident in a number of gender-marked
neologisms alongside other gender-specific and transferred forms of use. If,
however, war-time was seen as a watershed, the point at which ‘the door of the
Doll’s House opened’ (Daggett 1918), language offered its own reminders that
this door was meant to close once the war was over.

 Chapter 8: “Written on the Body” presents Clark’s documentation of the
language of sickness and death, offering spaces of both erasure and
over-lexicalization. Throughout the war, bleak lists of casualties appeared in
the daily press. Elsewhere, a variety of idioms aimed to soften the blow.
Traditional metaphors of life as a journey proliferated. On the other hand, in
wartime slang death and injury attracted a robust over-lexicalization. Clark
also drew attention to a diction of violent assault in which wounds of mind as
well as body were depicted as a feature of industrial war. Conceptual
metaphors reinforced a sense of nerves as fragile objects that can easily be
damaged. The diction of ‘nerve strain’ provided an umbrella term, encompassing
both the fear of attack to which non-combatants were exposed, and the
emotional toll caused by the absence of those on active service. Popular
discourses of health readily appropriated war-time diction and trench warfare
itself in ways that evoked other synergies between Home and active fronts.

Chapter 9: “Last Words” opens with the language of memory and memorialization,
alongside the diction of peace as the war finally came to an end. The arrival
of the first uncensored letters from abroad broke war-time forms of silence
and constraint. Censorship, with its attendant changes, was imposed during the
war and then removed, restoring the verbal freedoms which existed in pre-war
days. Although demobilization and related forms were entirely male spheres,
after the war other correlates were required. Very few women were willing to
go back into domestic service. There was ‘no question of women being allowed
to oust men from jobs that they would have kept but for their absence at the
war’ (The Times 1918). Thus female demobilization presupposed a return to the
domesticities of home. Male demobilization was not without its problems, too.
The unemployed ex-soldier or ex-serviceman evoked no longer the honor and
manliness of active service as extolled during the war, but became a
disturbingly marginalized figure whose war service was increasingly irrelevant
to civilian life. 

Clark also documented early language of war tourism by which the battlefields
of the Western Front became both spectacle and commodity. 

Rolls of honor presented other forms of spectacle in which private and public
memory intersected. It increasingly signified a tribute to those who had lost
their lives in the nation’s cause. The emergence of public war shrines
revealed similar processes. War shrines became relics of loss, synonymous with
war memorials. War memorials embodied signifying practices that ‘legitimize
and help to maintain war as a reasonable and justifiable social practice.’
(Machin & Abousnnouga 2013).

 In Clark’s notebooks, multilingualism existed alongside evidence of
xenophobia, patriotism alongside despair, fashion and hardship alongside a
language of resistance and the determination to ‘carry on’. A single meaning
of war was impossible. 

Clark died in 2022, and his “Words in War-Time” remained incomplete, unrevised
and largely unread – an archive of scraps and annotations, ‘both fascinating
and frustrating’. The transfer of his lexical scrapbooks to a digital database
was of great help not only in identifying recurrent themes and interests or
the patterns of expansion or contraction within particular domains of use, but
also in enabling a process of comparative reading. Clark’s status as another
forgotten, but important lexicographer, and a dedicated language historian
within the ephemera of World War One can be remedied thanks to this. Clark
provides a way of thinking about war and its institutions in a host of words
and meanings which have, in other respects, since been lost from view. His
“Words in War-Time” bear witness to one man’s struggle to document the idioms
and idiosyncrasies of living English in a world at war. 

EVALUATION

Lynda Mugglestone's “Writing a War of Words” is a fascinating account of the
immense effort of Andrew Clark, a diarist, historian and philologist, to
record in minute detail the fleeting existence of English words and shifting
meanings which appeared during the Great War in a variety of unconventional
sources such as advertising, newspapers, and letters from the Front. This
immense lexical richness vividly recreates different aspects of everyday life
of ordinary people facing the harsh realities of war. It also presents war as
a force for change in areas such as gender and identity, of food and fashion,
or ideology and propaganda. In addition, it shows the role of ideology in
shaping the language at the time as reflected in purism on the one hand and
linguistic borrowing on the other, lexical expressions referring to allies and
enemies, as well as language strategies used to promote solidarity and
ostracize anyone not willing to contribute to the war effort.

Thus, the book is an invaluable contribution both to lexicography and history
‘from below’, recording words and expressions which have been preserved thanks
to Clark’s immense efforts. It will certainly inspire future research which
will provide new insights into the lexical impact of the Great War on the
English language.

 The book will be of interest to lexicographers, language historians,
historians and anyone interested in World War I and its discourse, which can
be extended to the discourse of war in general.

REFERENCES

Allen, Irving. 1983. The Language of Ethnic Conflict: Social Organization and
Lexical Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Clark, Andrew. Words in War-Time (III), f. 13; (XXXIII), f. I.

Daggett, Mabel Potter. 1918. Women Wanted: The Story Written in Blood Red
Letters on the Horizon of the Great World War. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Grayzel, Susan. 2012. At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain
from the Great War to the Blitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Machin, David & Gill Abousnnouga. 2013. The Language of War Monuments. London:
Bloomsbury.

The Future of Women Workers. Times. 7 December 1918.

Weekley, Ernest. 1932. Words & Names. London: John Murray.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Prof.Dr. Lelija Socanac is a retired professor at the University of
Zagreb,Croatia. She was the head of the Center for Language and Law at the
Faculty of Law, Zagreb. Her research interests include legal linguistics,
historical sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, (critical)discourse
analysis, contact linguistics and multilingualism.





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