Geof Huth 2018-11-13 14:59:47
The meanings that accrue to words are much more complicated and messy than most of us would imagine.
Those of us in the somewhat narrow (yet infinitely expansive) world of archives may wonder why we archivists would spend the time we have over the last many decades to define our own terms of art—and why we never finish this task.
Archivists began this lexicographic adventure at the opening of the 1970s, first with Harold T. Pinkett’s outline of the scope of a “Glossary of Records Terminology.” By 1974, the results of that article led to a basic yet workmanlike glossary filling nineteen pages of American Archivist. Maygene F. Daniels revised and extended that glossary in 1984 for A Modern Archives Reader. Then in 1992, the booklet A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers by Lewis J. Bellardo and Lynn Lady Bellardo built upon the bones of its predecessors. About once a decade, it seems, we make a big step in the lexicographic history of archives.
Expanding Terminology
Only in 2005 did the profession publish an actual book-length glossary, Richard Pearce-Moses’ A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, the culmination of almost forty years’ work by archivists looking seriously at the words they used and documenting how they used them. This was the first glossarial work based on professional lexicographic practices. Remarkably imaginative, it rethought the entire system archivists had used to understand their words and made the process more authoritative and verifiable.
We are now thirteen years from the publication of that seminal work. In the intervening years, the reach and complexity of archivy, along with our terminology, has only expanded. For the past few years, SAA’s Dictionary Working Group has been building an archives dictionary for the twenty-first century: a digital dictionary that we can grow and revise as needed. This new and still becoming work, Dictionary of Archives Terminology, will be the first lexicographic work for archives that includes illustrations, shows the breadth of these words in their original context, and is guided by a detailed style guide and production manual. We have endeavored to make the dictionary as accurate and dependable as possible.
Making Sense of Our Shared Vocabulary
Yet the core of the dictionary is still the words themselves and the various senses each word carries. We have not created this dictionary because we believe archivists don’t understand their own words. We wrote and continue to write it because individuals never know the full extent of the languages they use. Since we have spent the time looking closely at how we as archivists use words, we have been able to illuminate the depth of our shared vocabulary as well as the richness of meaning within individual words—and thus help us all better know what we are saying to each other.
Take, for example, the words “archives” and “archive.” At first glance, these appear to be the same word, the former being nothing more than the plural of the latter. But the meanings that accrue to these words—based on our use of them over the years—are much more complicated and messy than most of us would imagine.
The word “archives” is actually both the singular and plural form of the word. Our preliminary examination of this term has uncovered eight separate senses of the word, including ones meaning records, a facility, a repository, an organization, our profession, or even a periodical. With this variety of meanings in a word so central to our profession, it might seem impossible for us to ever understand each other. But we do, and this happens through the linguistic miracle of context, something as central to making meaning within language as it is within archives—whatever that last word means.
Remember that those eight senses cover only the word “archives.” Counterintuitively, the term “archive” has five senses, only two of which it shares with “archives.” How is this even possible? How can these two terms, which are essentially the same word, be used in such different ways? How can the definitions of these terms run from “records of continuing value” to “archivy” to “a conceptual construct of a storehouse of recorded knowledge with outsized social and political significance that generally controls meaning and discourse and serves as a simulacrum of truth and fact”? How do we ever make sense with each other when all we have is words?
The answer is: With effortless difficulty. Over time, through endless trial and error, we learn the tricks of language—we begin to understand each other—yet we continue to make mistakes. We never really learn the language, but we devise reasonable work-arounds that allow us to use it with something approaching facility.
With Imprecise Precision
This new dictionary won’t solve the problem of interpreting language, but it will help us learn the language of our profession and learn how to use it better. Language makes sense through a process of imprecise precision: a word seems to mean exactly one definable thing, until it means another, and then another after that, and so on. The initial meaning of the word may remain even as its meanings proliferate—or it may fall away entirely. Our language changes every day.
And that is why the Dictionary Working Group has been working for years, with more years to follow, to create the Dictionary of Archives Terminology. We are building it upon the work of those who started before us, particularly the work of Richard Pearce-Moses. We are refining it to make it better for our use as archivists and to justify our definitions as lexicographers. We are extending it because archivists keep making new terms as they find new ways to see and understand their world. As that world of archives becomes richer and we understand our work more deeply, we fashion new words, we consolidate new knowledge. We need a dictionary so we can glimpse, if but for a moment, the entire lexicon of language, before the little ship of archives on the giant ocean of language dips back down behind the upcoming swell and we must begin again to learn that one thing we thought we knew most well.
Author’s Note: I wrote this article with the assistance of A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Dictionary Working Group’s draft of the Dictionary of Archives Terminology. We always need dictionaries!
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