Studies in Words

In this work of historical lexicography, C. S. Lewis examines how the meanings of common English words have shifted over centuries. The book grew out of Lewis's teaching practice with Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts, where he and his pupils traced how a word's senses radiated outward from a central meaning. Lewis addresses the book primarily to students, arguing that accurate reading of older literature depends on understanding a word's history, since in older works one knows what one does not understand, but in more recent works one may read contentedly for years before discovering that one has been imposing modern meanings the author never intended (3). His method involves driving words from different languages "abreast" (2), studying Greek, Latin, and English side by side to observe how similar semantic operations occur independently across unrelated traditions.

Lewis's Introduction lays out seven principles governing semantic change. He argues that new meanings branch out from old ones like limbs on a tree, a process he calls "ramification," and that ordinary speakers navigate multiple meanings not through linguistic knowledge but through the insulating power of context, which excludes irrelevant senses from the mind. He identifies the "dangerous sense" (12) of a word: the dominant modern meaning readers instinctively impose on older texts. He distinguishes between a word's lexical meaning and a speaker's meaning, warns against trusting authors' explicit definitions as evidence of usage since such definitions are "purely tactical" (19), and introduces the concept of "verbicide," or "the murder of a word" (7), which occurs through inflation, partisan appropriation, and the drift from description to pure evaluation. He also traces the "Moralisation of Status-Words" (21), whereby terms of social rank become terms of moral praise or blame.

The chapter on "Nature" is the longest and most intricate. Lewis traces Latin natura (sort, kind, character), English kind (which occupies a similar range), and Greek phusis (whose verb phuein means "to grow"). He identifies the momentous leap whereby pre-Socratic philosophers used phusis to mean "everything" (35), creating the dangerous sense of Nature with a capital. He then traces three "demotions" of this all-encompassing sense: the Platonic, in which the visible world is merely an imitation of transcendent forms; the Aristotelian, in which phusis became the subject of one discipline among others; and the Christian, in which Nature is subordinate to its Creator. He also traces the personification of Nature as "Great Mother Nature" (41), an immanent force or deity. The bulk of the chapter catalogues the many contrasts in which "natural" appears: natural versus unnatural, natural versus artificial, natural versus supernatural, and others. Lewis concludes by noting that for William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, "Nature" effectively meant the country as opposed to the town, a usage he considers philosophically superficial but expressive of a serious human emotion.

The chapter on "Sad" pairs this English word with Latin gravis (heavy). Lewis traces Anglo-Saxon sæd from its original meaning of gorged or full, through heavy, solid, firm, and reliable, to the "grave-senses" in which a "sad" face is composed rather than melancholy. The modern dangerous sense of melancholy emerged only gradually, and Lewis shows that in many medieval texts the modern meaning would produce nonsense.

The chapter on "Wit" traces what Lewis calls an almost perfect case study. Anglo-Saxon wit meant mind or intelligence. A crucial branching occurred when the plural wits came to mean types of mind, making wit something distinguishing an individual. This sense became the standard translation of Latin ingenium (talent or genius), for which Lewis coins the term "wit-ingenium." Meanwhile, the dangerous sense of verbal cleverness was rising. Lewis documents 17th-century critics who insisted wit does not mean puns and jingles, proving it was coming to mean exactly that. He traces the "tactical definitions" (104) whereby Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope each redefined the word to match their own literary ideals, and concludes with the "happy ending" in which wit settled into its current stable meaning.

The chapter on "Free" traces moralised status-words across Greek, Latin, and English. Lewis shows how eleutheros, liber, free, and frank all began as terms of legal status and acquired ethical senses describing the character appropriate to a free person: generous, disinterested, straightforward. He pairs frank (from "a Frank," a conqueror in Gaul) with villain (from villanus, a serf), tracing villain from literal class meaning to moral opprobrium. He devotes a substantial section to liberal as a cultural term and denounces its appropriation by political and theological parties as a form of verbicide.

The chapter on "Sense" traces the bifurcation of Latin sentire into an introspective meaning (to feel or think) and a sensory meaning (to perceive), following both branches through sententia, sensus, sensible, and sensibility. Lewis distinguishes four meanings of "common sense," including its medieval psychological sense as the faculty that coordinates the five outward senses. He traces sensibility through the 18th-century cult of emotional responsiveness and concludes with Jane Austen's era, when sensible settled into its current dangerous sense of "having good sense."

The chapter on "Simple" traces three branches from Latin simplex (one-fold): the logical, where simply means "unconditionally"; the ethical, where simplicity degrades from sincerity through guilelessness to near-imbecility; and the popular, where simple means plain or unelaborate. Lewis argues that the word's final state is a "semantic sediment" (179) in which nearly all senses blend into a general appealingness resisting exact paraphrase.

The chapter on "Conscience and Conscious" traces words sharing a Latin root meaning "to know together with." Lewis follows the internalization of this concept: A person becomes privy to his own deeds, becoming his own witness and accuser. He identifies the shift whereby conscience passed from the witness-box to the legislator's throne, becoming what theologians called synteresis, the inner lawgiver that commands and forbids. He traces the word's further degradation into mere fear of punishment and shows how English conscious gradually lost the "together" sense to acquire the modern meaning of simple awareness.

The chapter on "World" distinguishes World A (age, duration) from World B (the earth or universe), arguing that both grew from a common root meaning something like "human life." Lewis traces the complications introduced by Biblical translation, in which English world served for four Latin words translating four Greek words, conflating the ordered universe (kosmos) with the present evil age (aion). He follows the resulting meanings through the pejorative senses of "worldly," the replacement of the old geocentric kosmos by the modern "universe," and "world" meaning people, from the human race to Society with a capital S.

The chapter on "Life" traces the word from its concrete sense through chronological, qualitative, and evaluative meanings. Lewis introduces the concept of a "semantic halo" (282), whereby the emotional warmth attached to life in its concrete sense seeps into all its other uses. He argues that much modern talk about "life" functions as a purely evaluative term meaning "what I approve," and suggests that the modern mystique around the word deserves critical scrutiny.

The brief chapter on "I Dare Say" traces the phrase from its original meaning of "I dare to say, I take full responsibility for asserting," as in Sir Thomas Malory's Sir Ector eulogizing Launcelot, to its modern weakened sense of "probably." Lewis examines Austen's many uses of the formula, finding passages where only the older, stronger sense fits.

The final chapter, "At the Fringe of Language," examines the boundary between language and inarticulate emotional expression. Lewis argues that poetry communicates emotion by creating imaginatively the grounds for it, through description and metaphor, rather than through purely emotional words. He concludes that emotional words must retain some non-emotional content to remain effective, and warns that pejorative critical epithets chosen for their power to hurt rather than their diagnostic accuracy are instruments of the very verbicide he has spent the book opposing.