Word-hoard

This chapter discusses Clark’s ‘Words in War-Time’ as a distinctive project in its own right. Beginning in 1914, it has an intellectual hinterland that reaches into Victorian Oxford, the philological revolution, and the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1). Other models of historiography were, however, important, too. The chapter also explores the inspiration Clark drew from his own earlier work on the English Civil War writer Anthony Wood’s Life and Times and John Aubrey’s contemporaneous Brief Lives –especially in relation to their emphasis on the need to register living history with ‘minuteness’ in a process that directs particular attention to its incidental details. Clark’s work on language in World War One proves, in this light, intriguingly experimental, presenting both emulation and resistance in relation to earlier works on language and the narratives of time and change that might be made.