Introduction: Writing a War of Words

This chapter introduces Clark as a writer and historian of Home Front life in World War One, alongside the distinctive approaches of his work on language. It focusses on his decision to make a set of language scrapbooks, and looks at his early interest in the incidental and ephemeral as artefacts of time. Drawing on both history and language history, it examines the liberal inclusivity that characterizes his work, not least in his attentive pursuit of many words which still remain unrecorded in formal lexicography.