The idea that language not only reflects but also shapes culture forms the basis of Carey McIntosh's study of words and cultural change in Britain from the middle of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Semantics and Cultural Change in the British Enlightenment: New Words and Old. The main focus of the book is on new words or senses and how they permit insights into new ways of thinking, behavior, and social organization, while not neglecting traditional cultural concepts and words. In this undertaking, McIntosh makes good use of a host of sources such as proverbs, ballads, old cookbooks, histories of agriculture, and most notably of the Oxford English Dictionary, but, somewhat surprisingly, not of the Historical Thesaurus of English attached to the latter.

Older words reflecting the life experiences of both the rural and poorer population, treated in chapter 1 and parts of chapter 5, usually belong to colloquial, vernacular, and local strata of the English language. They are a mirror of the material culture (such as work and its necessary tools, foodstuffs, and eating habits) and of the prevalent social and legal structures (such as kinds of punishments, which tended to be both socially humiliating and gender-biased). Traditional values are enshrined in common proverbs, while belief systems and worldviews, even of many educated people, are highlighted by (still) very common magical and astrological concepts.

While such words often have meanwhile become obsolete, an important part of the new words and senses originating from about 1650s onward are treated by McIntosh as key indicators of evolving middle-class lifestyles and mental dispositions characteristic of the enlightenment and science. Chapter 2 illustrates a very different material and social culture from the previous chapter, a comfortable one with sofas in sitting-rooms, with diversions like ballet, concerts, promenade, and shopping, with drinks like tea and chocolate in coffee-houses, and with amiable, charming, and polite people socializing in clubs and suitably equipped private homes (new words italicized here and below). The concept of party as a social gathering at a private house for entertainment is shown in chapter 5 to be an essentially novel activity typical of the eighteenth century, with many card, tea, dinner, or similar parties found in contemporary texts. Chapter 3 brings together three aspects, which though disparate at first sight, are connected by a common enlightened outlook. The drive for orderliness and organization that results in dictionaries, directories, catalogues, and disciplines such as botany (section 3.1) is equally at work in the gradual standardization of weights and measures with the concomitant loss of older words that illustrate the earlier confusing variety in this field (section 3.3). The organization and spread of information as found in periodicals, journals, and in lending libraries assists the development of democratic ideas, which in turn are linked to middle-class values (section 3.2) finding their outlet in more sociopolitical and economic rights of participation (reflected in words such as liberty, constitution, hustings, business, credit). Chapter 4 focusing on the new science presents both a contrast to the old magical world described in chapter 1 with the new emphasis on facts, evidence, empiricism and a link to the changes described in chapter 3 by the scientific concerns with accuracy, precision, and data.

One notable result of the English-speaking scientific circles centered on the Royal Society was the creation of an incipient “public sphere”—that is, a social space open to educated people independent of traditional institution and to a certain extent regardless of social rank. Thus, public (such as opinion, spirit, credit.) is also one of the enlightenment keywords discussed by McIntosh in chapter 6, which are to be understood in Raymond Williams's sense of words being “inextricably bound up with the problems (they are) being used to discuss” (152). The nine keywords chosen here (from a larger group of at least nineteen) are all neologisms in the period. While things denoted as public span science, the press, and middle-class coffeehouse culture, keywords like individuality, self-consciousness, critique, cosmopolitan, and Bluestocking are more personal in nature. What unites them is the emphasis on liberation from constraints, on introspection, and on the careful use of intellectual powers, while Bluestocking in addition reveals both the opportunities the Enlightenment might provide for independent women, but also the critical assessment this received. The keywords sympathy, already mentioned in chapter 3 in the context of sociability, and commercial are linked by McIntosh especially to the Scottish Enlightenment and its views on their relations to morality and civilization, respectively. The final keyword classification unites ordering activities across the scientific, sociopolitical, and personal spectrums. Conveniently, all new words treated by McIntosh can be found as an alphabetical list in an appendix.

Taking the cue from (historical) politics understood as conceptual history, McIntosh's study amply illustrates his point that knowledge and understanding of the past is also “a linguistically constituted activity” (147) and that lexical and semantic developments are important for tracking cultural history. The six chapters indeed present a convincing and engagingly woven tapestry of such interlinked lexical and sociohistorical states and changes. The coexistence of and probably tensions between old and new words and worldviews could perhaps have been more strongly accentuated. At some points the sociohistorical narrative also takes perhaps more than its proper share of space; for the keywords in chapter 6, a more discourse analytic approach showing them in actual and potentially disputed (con)texts would have been welcome. At other points, the role of language seems overstated, as when McIntosh hypothesizes that the presence of many truth qualifiers in English make it “easier to be scientific and to think scientifically in English than in other languages” (124), which may be better explained by mutually influenced coevolution. What detracts somewhat from the undoubted strengths of the book is the lack of a general conclusion. Some relevant points that could have been fruitfully developed into an overarching discussion of words and concepts, cultural variation and cultural history, are now hidden in parts of chapter 5. Despite these criticisms, Semantics and Cultural Change in the British Enlightenment makes for a very stimulating read and, one hopes, inspires more work of this kind.