Re: Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)

On 30/03/2024 3:49 a.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-03-29, Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
 

"In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could invent
new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new
words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot
use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet
mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but
part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a
sentence."
>
Can anyone make sense of this for me?
Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?

 The "we" refers to today's writers, the "you" is impersonal (German
"man").

Yes. I asked the question by way of pointing out that she seems to be generalizing to all of today's writers what looks like a purely personal problem (or belief or practice or attitude). The statements about words and language just seem to me mostly wrong. OK, I'm not a writer (in the narrow sense). But I doubt that her strictures apply even to all of her fellow novelists, poets, etc.
Perhaps if she had given an example of a new word which "we" couldn't use, her meaning might have been clearer... But the only actual word she mentions in the quoted passage is "incarnadine"! Some of you will know this from _Macbeth_ ii ii 62. It was in fact a new(ish) word in Shakespeare's time, when Woolf thinks English was a "new language".
(What I had not noticed, until checking OED, was that in the passage referred to it is used as a verb -- Shakes. may have been the first to do this.)
Woolf writes:
"Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word 'incarnadine' belongs to 'multitudinous seas'."
I guess this is just a mystificatory way of saying that great writers think of striking ways to put words together.