Nature: The Most Complex Word in the English Language
Raymond Williams, the Welsh literary scholar, on why ‘Nature’ is the most complicated keyword in human thought
“A simple measure of the importance of ‘nature’ as an idea is to imagine us dispensing with the term and its meanings altogether. The ‘hole’ in our language would be enormous. We’d be rendered both inarticulate and incapable in large areas of our thought and action. In short, if we didn’t already have the term in our present-day vocabulary, we’d probably have to invent it.”
– Raymond Williams
What is a ‘keyword’?
When the Welsh literary theorist and novelist Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society in 1976 it became an instant classic. In Keywords, Williams brings his deep historical lens and cultural insight as a literary scholar to over a hundred commonly used words in English: from ‘art’, ‘humanity,’ ‘genius’ and ‘violence’, to ‘capitalism’, ‘sex’,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘revolution’.
