debonaire@mindspring.com writes:
12/05/01 As this story has attracted some interest and discussion, we have decided to bring it back to the front page.
This is a glossary/appendix from a forthcoming book published by Softskull Press titled 'Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to capitalist Globalization (December, 2001)
Readers are invited to submit terms/cliches/buzzwords which they find worthy of elaboration, ridicule or dissection. Please post.
Glossary of Terms Relevant to Globalization
Iain A. Boal
The compiler salutes that small band of writers drawn to the critical glossary as a literary form: first, contrarian lexicographers such as Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) and Charles Bufe (The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations); poets, too, of a committed imagination with an accurate ear for the demoralization of the dialect of the tribe - - and here I think, for example, of Benjamin Peret, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Paulin; but most to the purpose, a pair of critics, one American and the other Welsh -- Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams -- who composed what the former called "a dictionary of pivotal terms" and the latter dubbed "a vocabulary of culture and society". These glossators were far from nostalgic for some Adamic speech, for the "true meaning" of a word; nor did they intend to combat, in the manner of reactionary linguistic watchdogs, loose usage with precision, let alone vulgarisms with a style book. It is, in fact, the active range of meanings that matters, since the immense complexity and contradiction within terms like "environment" and "violence" register deep conflicts in the social order.
