The Word and History

No matter how much I try, I tend to see life through the lenses of an historian. I am always drawn to the question of how context --whether that is geographical location, personal family history, or gender--conditions the beliefs I hold, the way I vote, or the food I eat. I am, as it happens, also very interested in languages. Far from being a rigorous linguist, I often find myself thinking about the relationship between language, society, and history. I have, as of late, been thinking about how words and their meaning arise from a historical context--a new invention ('google it'), an event (September 11), or a neologism to describe a new trend in society (globalisation). Languages seem to be built word by word as individuals and societies amass new experiences. Each national tradition and language has a distinctive flavor and way of understanding the world through their language because their experiences have been distinct from everyone other traditions', set apart as they are by geography, climate, wars, and events.

For the individual today, standing at the end of this long build-up of language, an interesting relationship exists between himself and his language. The words he uses have the interesting characteristic of having the potentiality to express almost an infinitely wide range of collective memories, individual experiences, but at the same time the word must be precise enough to function as a definite signifier for daily communication. As a historian, I am mostly interested in how the individual is more often than not completely oblivious to the cultural and historical meaning that the word and language contains. Apart from the historian who is able to methodically unpack the history of a word, we mostly concentrate on a standard (albeit subjective) understanding. But even as we use words to communicate something definite, the possibility of manifold meaning arising from the collective basis of the word is ever-present as Emile Durkheim points out:

"Now it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or lesser extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?" (482-3)

Durkheim's quote about how words contain meanings that go beyond the individual evokes a thought I had recently. It has to do with the way our culture collectively understands (or misunderstands) the meaning of the words "Barack Obama". This "event" stands arguably as one of the most momentous events in American society in the previous decade. I must admit that I had a hard time grasping the full rationale behind the excitement in media broadcasts that used such a word as "historic" to describe the significance of a black president being elected to the White House. It struck me last week why I was experiencing this disconnect with the excitement surrounding the election of the first African-American to the presidency. I can best explain it in terms of a generation gap which highlights the underlying historical side of language. Being born in 1985, what I associate with the word "African-American" is radically different from what my parents or grandparents associate with the word. I only have second-hand knowledge of the civil rights movement, I have not felt the full range of emotions over lynchings, fire hoses, church-burnings, etc. that my parents (to speak nothing of middle-aged Africans-Americans) did growing up in the sixties. Partly as a result of growing up in Utah as well, the word "African-American" has been to a great degree discharged of any divisive, controversial content. I may understand it intellectually, but the chances were slim that Barack Obama's election would bring a tear to my eye conditioned as it is to see the world through the language of post-1985 culture. The advancing years and changing conditions shifted the meaning of a word. For the older generation, those memories of hate and race riots and an American seemingly eternally biased and broke still clung to the word "Barack Obama" and thus their experience of the event was powerful as it was symbolic of the exact cultural change that left me tearless.

I hope, however, that this post communicates one aspect of the value of studying history. Its value lies in understanding the historical context for the language we use and thus expanding our ability to sympathize with others as we expand our understanding of the meaning contained in the language we use.