From Access to Youth

The mid-term elections in the US, when Democrats took over Congress, were hailed as a victory for ‘progressives’, while David Cameron once claimed to be a ‘progressive conservative’. Well, progress towards what exactly? ‘It is certainly significant that nearly all political tendencies now wish to be described as progressive,’ wrote the cultural critic Raymond Williams, ‘but it is more frequently now a persuasive than a descriptive term.’ Quite.

That is taken from the seminal 1976 lexicon of political terms, Keywords:  A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, in which Williams traced the tangled history of words from ‘anarchism’ to ‘welfare’. The present volume was conceived to update his work and, I suppose, render it more ‘relevant’: a fashionable term of philistinism sadly not interrogated here.

It is quite the brutal, not to say vandalistic, tribute. Williams’s name does not appear on the cover, and the editors have simply binned two-thirds of his entries on the grounds that they have now ‘faded into history’. It is probably wise that they don’t list the discarded material or explain why it is now useless, since on consulting my own dog-eared original I find that among words the progressive modern editors deem defunct are, well, ‘progressive’ — which we started with — as well as ‘reform’, ‘radical’, ‘consensus’, ‘jargon’, ‘management’, ‘science’, and ‘unconscious’. Faded into history?

Let us cast an eye on what our super-modern editors, with their dozen academic contributors, have replaced all that pointless nonsense with. ‘Access’ and its cognates (‘accessibility’) are nicely discussed, pointing out that they often blend wish with fact. It is well observed that ‘diversity’ is ‘a way in which many of the complexities of multi-racial societies are both negotiated and obfuscated’, but the entry for ‘feminist’ is hobbled by the lack of ‘radical’, not to mention the acronym TERF, for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, which we do not find either in the homiletic entry for ‘trans’.