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Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 First Thoughts -- 2 Very Often, We Do Things with Words -- 3 A Preview of Six Chapters -- 4 Words and History -- 1 Old Words -- 1 Rural Life -- 2 A Village Doles Out Punishments -- 3 Cooking and Eating -- 4 Remnants of Feudalism -- 5 Hunting -- 6 Proverbs -- 7 Magic -- 2 New Words and the Middle Class -- 1 New Words and Cultural Change -- 2 The Invention of Comfort -- 3 A ‘Conversable World’ -- 3 The Enlightenment -- 1 Orderliness, Organization, and Modernity -- 2 A Gradual Spread of Democratic Values -- 3 Weights and Measures -- 4 Science and the English Language -- 1 The Royal Society -- 2 Artificial Languages and Prose Style -- 3 Scientific Words -- 4 Anna Wierzbicka and Empirical Science -- 5 Words, Cultural Change, and History -- 1 Old Words in Dictionaries -- 2 Local Words -- 3 New Words – Party and Fun -- 4 Language and Culture and History -- 5 The Politicization of English -- 6 New Words in the Enlightenment -- 1 Individuality and Self-Consciousness -- 2 Bluestocking -- 3 ‘Public’ Words and the Public Sphere -- 4 Sympathy -- 5 Commercial -- 6 Classification -- 7 Critique and Cosmopolitan -- 8 Conclusion -- Party and Fun – Texts -- More Old Words -- New Words -- Works Cited -- Index. Obsolete old words from 17th-century English villages reflect the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, bizarre foods, magic, horses, outrageous sexism, feudal duties. New words, first appearing in print 1650-1800, reflect a middle-class culture very different from an earlier courtly culture, interested in money, coffee-houses, and self-fulfillment. Chapters on pre-industrial and middle-class culture, the scientific revolution, and semantic change. They give strong evidence that new words and the new senses of old words played a key role in the British Enlightenment, its links with quantification and natural science, its tendencies towards reorganization and democracy, its redefinitions and revitalizations of women’s roles, social stereotypes, the public sphere, and the very concepts of individualism, sociability, and civilization itself
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