Woolf, Virginia
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (a clip of about three minutes; the English auto-captions are slightly garbled in a few places, and unclear words are omitted)
Core ideas
Woolf begins from the idea that English words are "full of echoes, memories, associations": they have been on people's lips for centuries, and that is one of the chief difficulties of writing. A word such as "incarnadine" cannot be used without recalling "multitudinous seas"; words have "contracted so many famous marriages in the past." Writers of an earlier age, when English was a new language, could invent words freely; today, new sights and sensations suggest new words readily, but we cannot use them, because a brand-new word cannot be set in an old language: a word is never a single, separate entity but part of other words, and "it is not a word until it is part of a sentence." To mix new and old words is "fatal to the constitution of the sentence," and using new words properly would require inventing a whole new language, which is not "our business" for now: the question is how to combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, create beauty and tell the truth.
She then reflects ironically on why teaching cannot solve the problem: despite a hundred professors lecturing on past literature, a thousand critics reviewing present books and hundreds of students passing English literature examinations, we do not write or read better than people did four hundred years ago, "unlectured, uncriticized, untaught." The fault, she argues, is not with professors, reviewers or writers but with words, "the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things." They can be sorted alphabetically in dictionaries, but "words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind": in moments of strong emotion, when we most need words, we find none although half a million are at our disposal.
The talk ends with a humorous portrait of words as living beings: they live variously and strangely, ranging, falling in love, meeting; they are less bound by ceremony and convention than we are, marry across languages (English, French, German, Indian, "negro" words, in the speaker's phrasing), and refuse to be laid under laws beyond "a few trifling rules of grammar and spelling." They like people to think and feel before using them, but not about the words themselves; they are sensitive, resent being made self-conscious, and resist a "society for pure English" by starting another of "impure" English. They are "highly democratic," hate being useful, making money or lectured about in public, and above all hate being stamped with one meaning. Their power to mean different things to different people is why they survive; Woolf suggests that one reason there is no great novelist or critic today is that we refuse to let words be at liberty and pin them down to their "useful meaning."
Excerpts
“Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. [...] In moments of emotion, when we most need words, we find none; yet that dictionary is at our disposal, some half million words, all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.”
“English words are full of echoes, memories, associations. [...] They have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. [...] Who can use 'incarnadine' without remembering 'multitudinous seas'?”
“They hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude. [...] They mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, [plain] to the next.”