Reviews for Mini Cambridge-Eichborn German dictionary

The average rating for Mini Cambridge-Eichborn German dictionary based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-16 00:00:00 Chad Rackel As I get older, I’ve been becoming more interested in etymology. Years ago I read a book about metaphor and poetry that said that most words start off as metaphors – essentially that we are all synesthetics – and that even as words change their meanings over time, there is a residual of these early metaphorical meanings that linger around the new meanings of the word. What is interesting about this residual meaning is that you don’t particularly have to ‘know’ the original ‘meaning’ of the work for the original meaning to affect the current meaning of the word. This can all sound a bit like mystical nonsense, but I don’t mean it to. And I also don’t want it to sound like I’m saying something even more snobby, even if I suspect that the snobby meaning might hold more truth – that is, that knowing the etymology of words is something likely to be more available to certain classes than it is to ‘the rest of us’ and so ‘they’ are able to understand the nuance of meanings better than ‘we’ are. I think learning the etymology of words complicates their meanings, showing shades of meaning we might not have otherwise notice. But Williams is particularly opposed to this idea in its most boldly stated form. He points out that the idea people can speak their own native language all of their lives, and yet not be understood to be able to speak it ‘properly’ is one of the most obnoxious versions of class shaming imaginable. And I totally agree – but I also think learning the genealogy of words brings ideas to life in ways it is hard to achieve otherwise. Word origins and their shifts in meaning can give us a strange sense of vertigo. Recently, I learnt that ‘normal’ only came into the English language in the mid-17th century. That means that Shakespeare never referred to anyone as ‘normal’ – in fact, for that sense of the word you had to wait until the early 19th century (I think you needed to wait for statistics to become a thing). Imagine not being able to say to Shakespeare, ‘that man’s a bit too normal for my tastes’. Normal is from the Latin for a carpenter’s square – so, it basically meant right-angled. Knowing that original meaning might not fully explain what normal means, but I think it helps us to make a word we otherwise take for granted a little strange – and that that is a good thing. This book does something like that the whole way through. The words selected are among the trickiest words in the English language (and in social theory) – we are talking ‘culture’, ‘democracy’, ‘communism’, ‘civilisation’, ‘romanticism’... But while Williams provides interesting etymologies of the words, he does much more than ‘just’ that. And that is because these words don’t really have a meaning – rather they have a series of contested meanings depending on who is using them. This is a similar point to the one above about the shaming of people who do not use the ‘standard’ version of the language. This means that words that seem at first glance to be unequivocally good – say, realism or rationalism or idealism – become complicated and even soiled be association with certain theories. This is particularly true as our ideas broaden and develop over time so that what is wrought by these changes shift the meanings of otherwise innocuous or even positive words making them turn into their opposites. Positivist is perhaps as good an example of this as any other to show the problems associated with what might otherwise seem unproblematic words. The word comes from Comte and originally meant ‘scientific’ or perhaps more ‘empirical’. This was a case of using the word for a philosophical position of arguing against a priori ideas – but it became increasingly associated with the idea of ‘if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist’ – which is so clearly nonsense that it probably seems inevitable that eventually positivism itself would struggle under the weight of this. One of the distinctions Williams doesn’t bring up in the context of positivism is that it is often strongly contrasted with ‘normative’ – where ‘scientific theories’ are generally understood as wanting to be on the side of the positive, rather than on the side of the ‘normative’ – they want to be square, but not square by convention. I think positivism works as a ‘scientific’ idea if what it is discussing is more about bicycles than rats – something I’ve stolen from someone I read a while ago. That is, positivism works where we can say ‘all things being equal’. For ‘all things being equal’ to be a reasonable thing to say implies that you can hold a single variable constant while you turn the other dial from side-to-side like a madman. Positivism works when you can take something apart, checking each of the bits you dismantle as you go so as to consider their independent value, and then, at your leisure, put the whole thing back together again. You know, like you can do with a bicycle. But not everything in the world is like a bicycle. Some things are more like rats. And rats really don’t like it when you start dismantling them. Chop the leg off a rat and even if you are able to remove some of the arthritis from around the knee, the rat as a whole still isn’t going to thank you for it. And even if you stick the leg back on almost as quickly as you removed it, the rat still might die from the trauma. Complex systems don’t have independent ‘parts’ – all things simply aren’t ‘equal’. Even when you can, Humpty-Dumpty-like, put the pieces back together again, the system as a whole might never get back to being right-angled – or even normal. I enjoyed this book, and I think it is still worth reading, even if it is getting a bit old, like the rest of us. And I learnt quite a lot along the way – things I hadn’t expected to learn. For example, I used to teach a subject on curriculum studies and would tell people that the three main ideas you need to learn in educational theory are curriculum, pedagogy and assessment – I stole (always steal, never borrow) this straight from Bernstein – but it is no less valuable for being stolen. Anyway, each of these words has a curious etymology. Pedagogy is from Greek for someone who accompanies a child – literally, ‘a boy guide’. Assessment is from Latin for ‘to sit beside’. Curriculum is also from Latin but it means ‘running track’. In this book, Williams tells me that ‘Career’ is from the same root as curriculum – which had never occurred to me. All of which made me wonder if the current shifts in how we work and study will encourage us to stop using ‘career’ and ‘curriculum’ – since ‘fixed courses’ is about as close to the opposite of what we will be facing as it is possible to think of. In his section on Labour he quotes something my mother has told me for most of my life, that the Bible tells us we live for three-score-and-ten years – something she fortunately seems to have forgotten since turning 70. It seems the Bible does say that, except what she never told me was that the Bible also effectively says ‘and that’s when you should die or bad stuff is about to happen’. The whole quote is: "The days of our years are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow." (Psalm 90:10) Basically, live until you are 70, and all will be good – live until you are 80 and you might have preferred to have died at 70. I bought this book years ago in a church hall when I was on the way to see a friend and had some time to kill. I meant to read it at the time, but you know how these things work out. All the same, I think it would have been a better book for me to have read in my 20s than 50s. Before I end, I want to stress something that Williams also stresses in this little book. He certainly isn’t saying that if we are only able to gain consensus, to achieve consistent definitions of the words we use, then all (or even most or even many) of our disputes will simply fall away. He is also not saying the opposite of this – that the meanings of words are completely relative and depend purely on who is using the words. Rather I think he is saying that trying to understand what the person you are talking to might mean when they use certain words may not resolve the disagreements between you both – but that it is unlikely to make matters worse – and that’s probably as close to a good thing as we can hope for.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-03 00:00:00 Dr Michael Deodhar Only Raymond Williams could write what amounts to an enjoyable dictionary. Though the book isn't necessarily meant to be read cover to cover, my "project" of reading one letter a day over the past month has been an enlightening, engaging, and sometimes surprising one. More generally, Williams' impulse in writing this has to be praised. Originally an appendix to Culture and Society, what became Keywords was then so massive he decided to publish it separately. As always, in disentangling the meaning of terms and concepts that are often taken for granted, Williams hopes to problematize our understandings of meaning. He insists that his is not a project, in fact, about meaning. Rather, it is about meanings (plural), which -- when unpacked and made visible -- do not bring about resolution but "just that extra edge of consciousness" (p.24). At its most basic level, that is exactly what this book is -- simultaneously and meditation and enumeration of the evolving contingencies of language that encourages us to see the connection between words and ideology.