Propos d'étymologie sociale

This work is the opposite of a dictionary. It does not deal with "language"; it does not claim authority over meanings, beyond the concrete use of vocabulary items, to compile a directory of generalisible criteria. On the contrary, it focuses on situations, drawn from the chaos of history, to identify differences in usage rather than consensus, those moments of rupture which move language forward. Hence the disparate nature of a collection of articles and chronicles from various sources.
For all these disparate texts, however, the aim is the same: to identify the form and content of a term at the moment when it “entered politics”, taking “form” to be its distinctive character in the utterance, its links to other words, its frequency of use, its specific uses, and “content” to be the strategies which are used in connection with it during exchanges between speakers or confrontational situations in which the word is a witness and a player.
It is during these exchanges that the major issues, and even the background ideologies which reside in words and the connections between words, are hidden - or revealed. These case studies, in a range of formats, come together to create a notion of the emergence of meaning which we call “social etymology”.