As a work of historical fiction, [b:The Dictionary of Lost Words|49354511|The Dictionary of Lost Words|Pip Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1576570225l/49354511.SY75.jpg|74793187] provides a gentle introduction to socio-linguistics - that is, why do some words mean different things when said by different people in different contexts?

The historical setting of turn-of-the-century England provides a fertile landscape for exploring not only how social class is marked by dialect and by accent, but how language also serves to construct social divides by reinforcing assumptions, taboos and things "that should not be named". At the same time, I was struck by how the absence of language breeds ignorance; you cannot express a sentiment, a desire, an anger, if you do not possess the words that accurately capture its tenor, its flavour, its characteristics, its nuance. A world of fewer words is the poorer because we cannot capture its complexity and are forced instead to describe it in broad, generalising strokes.

While primarily concerned with how language intersects gender and class, the development of the character of Esme also serves to show how languages stratifies people across life stages - the child, the adolescent, the mother, the widow, the maiden aunt - and how words take on new meaning as their context of use shifts.

I desperately wanted Esme, as a character, to recognise the power of the words that was gifted by the characters she interacted with - not just to scribe them or to record their definition verbatim, but somehow weaponise them, use them as bullets in the world war and in the war of equality in which she was embroiled. Giving womens' words ink, and solidifying them in print may have taken them from the mouths of speakers on the street, but this act did nothing to erode the inequality which bore them, or to upend the indignities of the people who spoke them.