Words in their habitat

One understands a word much better if one has met it alive, in its native habitat. So far as is possible our knowledge should be checked and supplemented, not derived, from the dictionary.

C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

C.S. Lewis

When scientists want to study the behavior of baboons or zebras, they rarely go to a zoo. Rather they observe an animal's behavior in its natural habitat. In Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis makes the same observation about words. If you want to make a serious study of words — what do they mean? how are they used? — you don't open a dictionary. You observe how they are actually used in sentences in both speech and the written word. That is, in fact, how dictionaries are made.

Studying words in their native habitat is what Lewis does in his book, observing how such words as nature, wit, free and world have been used over the centuries and how they were being used in conversation in his own time.

Words change meaning as time passes, and that is part of the fun. Today we mostly think of wit as referring to a keen, quick and original sense of humor. At one time it suggested intelligence, as in "he still has his wits about him."

Lewis observes that words, like leftovers in the refrigerator, can spoil. That is, they may no longer mean what they used to mean. He mentions liberal, conservative, evangelical, intellectual and temperance as examples. In the years since Lewis wrote his book many other words, such as gay, have been "spoiled" in this way.

Speaking of spoilage, Lewis observes, "Rotten, paradoxically, has become so completely a synonym for '"bad' that we now have to say bad when we mean 'rotten.'"