Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.
It was three weeks before her body was found.

Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
called "Words Fail Me".

She says:
"In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could invent
new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new
words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot
use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but
part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a
sentence."

Can anyone make sense of this for me?
Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?

Further:
"To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a
new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to it, is not at
the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the
English language as it is."

Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf

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On 2024-03-29, Ross Clark <[email protected]> wrote:

"In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could invent
new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new
words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot
use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but
part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a
sentence."

Can anyone make sense of this for me?
Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?

The "we" refers to today's writers, the "you" is impersonal (German
"man").

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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On 30/03/2024 3:49 a.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-03-29, Ross Clark <[email protected]> wrote:

"In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could invent
new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new
words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot
use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet
mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but
part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a
sentence."

Can anyone make sense of this for me?
Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?

The "we" refers to today's writers, the "you" is impersonal (German
"man").

Yes. I asked the question by way of pointing out that she seems to be generalizing to all of today's writers what looks like a purely personal problem (or belief or practice or attitude). The statements about words
and language just seem to me mostly wrong. OK, I'm not a writer (in the
narrow sense). But I doubt that her strictures apply even to all of her
fellow novelists, poets, etc.

Perhaps if she had given an example of a new word which "we" couldn't
use, her meaning might have been clearer... But the only actual word she mentions in the quoted passage is "incarnadine"! Some of you will know
this from _Macbeth_ ii ii 62. It was in fact a new(ish) word in
Shakespeare's time, when Woolf thinks English was a "new language".
(What I had not noticed, until checking OED, was that in the passage
referred to it is used as a verb -- Shakes. may have been the first to
do this.)

Woolf writes:
"Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer
knows that the word 'incarnadine' belongs to 'multitudinous seas'."

I guess this is just a mystificatory way of saying that great writers
think of striking ways to put words together.

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She may have been talking about Joyce's Ulysses, which contained
some new invented words, like [snotgreen sea] ------- or Joyce's FW


Joyce's Ulysses killed (eclipsed) her great novel.



James Joyce was famous for his wordplay and invention of new words in Ulysses. Here are some examples:

Coinages: These are entirely new words not found in any dictionary before Ulysses. Some examples include:

Ripripple: Describes something flowing like rippling water.
Bullockbefriending: A playful term for someone friendly with animals. Snotshotten: A rather unpleasant word for someone with a runny nose. Tattarrattat: An onomatopoeic word for a knocking sound.



Portmanteaus: These are words created by blending two existing words. Some examples include:

Homesweethome: A combination of "home" and "sweet home."
Greensleeves: Possibly a combination of "green" and "sleeves."
Afterhours: A combination of "after" and "hours." (Though this might seem common today, it was new at the time)



Neologisms: These are new words formed from existing morphemes (meaningful units of words). Some examples include:

Unlove: The opposite of love.
Onlookerish: Behaving like an onlooker.
Nightnoiseful: Full of night noises.


sherlockholmsing

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DQo=

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On 2024-03-30 06:42:35 +0000, Jeff Barnett said:

On 3/29/2024 7:41 PM, HenHanna wrote:

[ … ]

Greensleeves: Possibly a combination of "green" and "sleeves."

You're saying that "Greensleeves" did not appear in a dictionary until

after Joyce used it? That may be but the term has been around for

centuries according to folk song collectors, performers, and scholars

that I have met over the years.

"'A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves' was registered by
Richard Jones at the London Stationers' Company in September 1580"

1580 seems a bit before Joyce's time.

I was disappointed to learn from the Wikipedia article that Henry VIII
didn't compose the music.

In the 1950s, I was told that the song

Greensleeves, was rather misunderstood*.

--
Athel cb

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