Inquiries · open · since 11 May 2023 · last tended 16 Oct 2026
How does a concept travel, and when does it start to disqualify?
A concept’s meaning is the history of its uses: dated uses show when a word that described something began to disqualify someone.i
- det. 16 Oct · interpretedFirst concept chosen among seven candidates drawn from the French sources: “langue de bois”, a genealogy of the denunciation itself. Said to come from Russian and Polish and to enter French in the late 1970s: from memory, to verify.
- det. 16 Oct · correctedChoice reopened: nothing shows that “fanatique” had a comparable fate in French; the analogy with Klemperer is not evidence. The candidates will come from the French sources, and from more recent uses.
- det. 16 Oct · interpretedFirst concept chosen: “fanatique”, a word whose value Klemperer saw turn from blame to praise. Read in translation, with French sources alongside.
- det. 16 Oct · interpretedWorking formulation: follow uses, not definitions; the meaning is in who uses the word, against whom, and when.
- det. 16 Oct · correctedRereading the 2023 answers: the model credits “totalitarian” to Amendola’s “La dottrina del fascismo”, a 1932 text signed by Mussolini; Amendola wrote of a “sistema totalitario” in newspaper articles in 1923. From memory, to verify in the sources.
- det. 12 Oct · interpretedRecorded in the research register: how does a concept arise, change, and come to disqualify? What would settle it: one concept followed through a dated corpus.
- det. 11 May · interpretedStarting point: when was “totalitarianism” first used, and for which regime? Then “meritocracy” (16 May) and “decivilisation” (25 May), asked to a general model.
Position
Follow uses, not definitions: who uses the word, against whom, in which corpus, at which date. The genealogy describes; it does not settle political quarrels.i
What it refuses to claim
- Not a tribunal of opinions: showing that a word disqualifies does not say who is right.
- A first attestation is not an origin: earlier uses may sit in sources that are not digitised.
- A model’s account of a concept’s history is not a source until it is checked.
Working concepts
- Dated use
- an attestation with its date, its author, its medium and its target.
- Drift
- a change of referent or of target over time, while the word stays the same.
- Disqualifying use
- a use whose effect is to put someone outside the debate rather than to describe them.
Experiments
- proposed
Recheck the 2023 answers. Every date and author given by the model in May 2023, checked against the sources; one error is already suspected.
- proposed
A model’s genealogy against the sources. Ask several models, local and remote, for the first use and the first target of a concept, and score them against verified attestations.
- proposed
“Langue de bois” in a dated corpus. The expression used to denounce has a history of its own: find its first French attestations, then follow it in the press and in the open records of parliamentary debates. Who accuses whom of speaking it, and since when?
What it could lead to
- an idea A tool that follows a word through a dated corpus: attestations, targets and drift, each with its source.i
- an idea Spicilège and Rhizomes as the corpus of one’s own reading: when did a concept enter it, and through whom? · Spicilègei
Reading
Three conversations from May 2023; no bibliography assembled yet.
The 2023 answers came from a general model and contain at least one probable error; nothing they say is cited until checked. The works below are classics of the field, not yet reread for this inquiry.
- Reinhart Koselleck, 1979. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
- Quentin Skinner, 1969. Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas
- Hannah Arendt, 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism
- Michael Young, 1958. The Rise of the Meritocracy
- Norbert Elias, 1939. The Civilizing Process