The Language of the Past analyzes the use of history in discourses within the political, media and the public sphere. It examines how particular terms, phrases and allusions first came into usage, developed and how they are employed today. To speak of something or someone as representing the 'stone age', or characterize an institution as 'byzantine', to describe a business relationship as 'feudal' or to disparage ideals or morality as 'Victorian', refers to both a perception of the past and its relationship to the present. Whilst dictionaries and etymologies define meanings and origin points of words or phrases, this study examines how history is maintained and used within society through language.
Detailing the specific words and phrases associated with particular periods used to describe contemporary society, this thorough examination of language and history will be of great interest to those studying historiography, social history and linguistics.
?A powerful, conceptually well-informed and significant study. . . The author establishes a model for a persuasive study of the relationship between understandings of the past, and its claimed significance for the present. The chapters expose the subtle linguistic battlefields over the usage of words by politicians, commentators and the media to frame and valorise acts of historical commemoration, heritage, and persisting values. . . Importantly a case is made for establishing how the vocabulary and associated historical assumptions continue to underpin contested conceptions of modernity. This [book] ought to be very profitably read by academic historians, undergraduates, especially politicians, and the wider public. It again establishes how important conceptions of the past (and getting them right) is an urgent issue for our contemporary world.
