Lost Words and Lost Worlds
Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Stockholm

Reflects how the dramatic transformations of Stockholm in late 1800s resulted in elements of the language being lost.

Allan Pred (Author)

9780521022255, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 November 2005

328 pages, 22 b/w illus. 16 maps 3 tables
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.7 cm, 0.471 kg

"...the distinctively empirical, playfully theoretical, and decidedly original work of Allan Pred deserves careful attention. In Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth-century Stockholm, Pred develops an apparently esoteric topic into a finely tuned theoretical argument, using lost linguistic expressions of old Stockholm as a discursive foil against which to set a very special reading of the worlds lost to modernity." Dierdre Boden, Contemporary Sociology

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was the most dramatic era in the social and spatial transformation of Stockholm. During this time large-scale manufacturing industry rose and eclipsed small-scale artisan sectors of production; the city's population virtually doubled and there was a rapid extension and rebuilding of the urban fabric. Allan Pred reconstructs this transformation of Stockholm's local economy, civil society and built environment between 1880 and 1900 through an interpretation of lost elements of language, or forgotten fragments of daily discourse, of lost words and meanings that belonged to members of the working and periodically employed classes. His analysis reveals that a language of production, distribution and consumption practices subsumed a language of discipline-avoidance and survival tactics. He demonstrates that the 'folk geography', or language used for negotiating the city streets and getting from here to there, subsumed a language of ideological resistance; that a language of social reference and address, the tagging of nicknames on groups and individuals, subsumed a language of boundary transgression; and that these languages were cross-cut by folk humour, by a vocabulary of comic irony and irreverence.

List of plates
List of figures
Forewording and forewarning fragments
List of abbreviations
1. Pretext(s): lost words as reflections of lost worlds
2. A diversity of tongues: the practiced languages of Stockholm, 1880–1900
3. Mundane mouthings about things, tasks, and tactics: lost wor(l)ds of production, distribution, and consumption
4. Footing about the city, or getting around the streets and ideological domination: lost wor(l)ds of spatial orientation and popular geography
5. Finger-pointing at the Other and speaking I to eye: lost wor(l)ds of social reference and address
6. The world of the docks and the docker in the world
Last words on lost worlds
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Human geography [RGC]