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The inheritance of the German romantic “tradition” of irony by certain 20^th-century French texts can become legible in the way such texts repeat the following question: what is the relation between thought and language? This chapter examines how such a question is addressed by Saussure's Course in General Linguistics as well as by texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jean Paulhan. Consideration of etymology as a privileged site for the interaction and potential interference between thought and language also discloses the ineluctably historical dimension of such questions. The etymological pretension to release for thought a “true” meaning obscured over time by language becomes at once a new intervention in the future history of meaning. Paulhan's Alain, Or Proof by Etymology and Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster throw into sharp relief the difference between a historicity that results from ironic disruption and Heidegger's thinking of language and history as aletheia.

This chapter introduces the three sources of evidence for the book—paleoclimatology, archaeology, and comparative historical linguistics—and the three historical frameworks each offers for the history that follows in later chapters. It reviews the physical geography and ecology of south central Africa and reconstructs the region’s climate history to describe the changing environmental framework. Next, it uses archaeological evidence to reconstruct the history of regional settlement patterns and economies during the Iron Age. The chapter then introduces the method of comparative historical linguistics, including: a new classification of Botatwe languages based on lexicostatistics and innovations in phonology and lexis; an explanation of the reconstruction of words and their meanings (derivation and etymology); and the challenges and opportunities of glottochronology. Finally, the chapter weaves the three frameworks together into a settlement narrative of Botatwe communities in the broader context of the Bantu Expansion.

‘Lexicography and Modern Poetry’ provides an overview of the various uses that poets have made of dictionaries since the 1960s. Works by a number of poets from Britain and the United States are discussed, chiefly W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and R. F. Langley, but also Charles Olson, Robert Hass, and Harryette Mullen, among others. Following its early acknowledgement of Michael Davidson’s recognition of the ‘lexical insert’, the essay draws a number of connections between Auden, Prynne, and Langley, before the final section collates a range of examples that illustrate a number of the ways in which poets have attempted to challenge the authority of the dictionary.

William Empson was ambivalent about etymology; ‘we would often like an influence from past uses to survive in a word’, he wrote in 1977, ‘when it plainly doesn’t’. But he had always been preoccupied with ‘how a structure of meaning comes to be built up in a word’; this is part of what Kitty Hauser identifies as an ‘archaeological imagination’, an important strand of thought about origins and histories running through English modernism, by means of which what people would like to survive could be mysteriously animated. Empson’s poems of 1936 cast alterations and retentions of verbal meaning – which arise out of human behaviour but seem also to possess a power of their own – as figures for other forces detected but not fathomed. Considering contemporary events and public speculations over their causes and consequences, they were written while Empson, researching The Structure of Complex Words (1951), was thinking closely about what and how dictionary entries can convey. Shaped by reading the OED at a particular point in its own history, and through a particular historical moment, they also read that moment through the dictionary, and are set in motion by his wary investigation of what you could call an etymological imagination.

From the subtle and often ominous resonance of names in his earliest poems to the forensic investigations of Maggot (2010), Muldoon never allows etymology to be unequivocally relevant, or indeed irrelevant, to synchronic usage. This ambiguity is especially striking in his elegies, as it chimes with the classic dilemma of representing a loss for poetic gain. Through close readings of ‘Hedge School’, ‘Yarrow’, and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, this chapter examines the use of obsoleteness in Muldoon’s elegiac diction; words no longer current, but preserved in dictionaries, provide the poet with roundabout routes to a mitigated poetic grief. Whether evasive, provocative, and digressive, or, as in his elegy for Heaney, profoundly grounding, etymologies are an essential part of these poems’ struggle for closure.

In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill sketches a tableau of his study, singling out his hardbound set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, dictionaries were never far from his desk, and their presence is felt in much of his poetry, from interpolated definitions to pastiche etymologies and puns whose effectiveness depends upon a deep and lasting knowledge of the OED and American Heritage Dictionary. This essay takes as its starting point Merrill’s belief that dictionaries constitute a ‘collective unconscious’, discussing how the spirits of the dead are invoked not just by way of Merrill’s poetic experiments with Ouija boards, but through his ongoing fascination with the buried histories of words themselves. In close readings of Sandover, as well as some of Merrill’s later lyrics, it charts the poet’s lifelong preoccupation with acts of definition, and suggests that his poetry ultimately takes more delight in the ramifications of words than their roots.