User:LEa/SI29

Special Issue #29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances

January—March 2026

Outputs: small events (such as HowSpot), a glossary

Grapevine: My glossary entries

brittle

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 8

Brittle is a synonym for fragile. It is often used to describe something—a material object such as a vase or a tooth, or a concept such as friendship or language—(being on the verge of) breaking, and doing so without prior stress or stretching. In my mind it therefore has a mostly negative connotation.

Interestingly, the authors of Keywords for Radicals use the word in a positive way. Language is especially brittle in “periods of change” (cf. Introduction to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams), and this is an opportunity to reflect on understandings and contradictions of words, and to mold language into new and possibly better forms.

For context, this is the full quote by Williams from the introduction to Keywords:

When a particular history is completed, we can all be clear and relaxed about it. But literature, aesthetic, representative, empirical, unconscious, liberal: these and many other words which seem to me to raise problems will, in the right circles, seem mere transparencies, their correct use a matter only of education. Or class, democracy, equality, evolution, materialism: these we know we must argue about, but we can assign particular uses to sects, and call all sects but our own sectarian. Language depends, it can be said, on this kind of confidence, but in any major language, and especially in periods of change, a necessary confidence and concern for clarity can quickly become brittle, if the questions involved are not faced.

chatter

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 9

Chatter is mentioned in Keywords for Radicals as a form of horizontal communication among workers (manifested in countless calls or in a never-ending stream of messages). The authors state that the service-orientated economy of today revolves mostly—if not entirely (see Paolo Virno)—around communicative work. Later in the text (p. 20), they use chatter in a sense more close to a definition by the book: talking idly and on trivial subjects. Can then be concluded that modern labour is babbling and therefore is obsolete?:)

Chatter can include gossip.

polysemic

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 18

The term polysemy comes from Ancient Greek: polys meaning “many” and sema meaning “sign”. An expression, for example a word, a phrase or a symbol, of polysemic character has several distinct but related meanings, and is therefore ambiguous.

In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states that “[…] questions are not only about meaning; in most cases, inevitably, they are about meanings.” He goes on to explain that when writing a dictionary entry, the meaning of a word is usually strongly tied to a specific place and time. However, with words, especially those that describe ideas or values, we usually encounter a complexity of meanings that includes changes over time. In this sense, most words are polysemic and difficulties arise when one tries to squeeze them into a single definition.

Ironically, the first thing I did for this glossary entry was to write a definition. When I first read the word polysemic, I did not know the meaning and had to look up a definition myself to make sense of it. Looking back now—I could have translated it had I given it little more thought.