And these days, when a handful of dealers are richer than many museums, commercial galleries may more and more be where the historical word can be spread.
The lexicographer is the historical word detective trying to identify and explain these puzzles," he writes, shrewdly navigating the intersection of language and culture, how we shape words and how words shape us.
Of 282 biographies included in the great Chinese historical work "Words & Deeds of Famous Men of Chinese History, 161 are Fukinese.
James Holden, writing in 1911, noted that American and British writers, both contemporary and historical, used words like "imbecile", "coward", "unready", and "old woman" to describe Abercrombie.
Great art works work in the background of our historical worlds, in other words, by partially embodying and so selectively reinforcing an historical community's implicit sense of what is and what matters.
It's research for an artist celebrated for his elaborate, pencil-drawn city maps, densely forested with signs, symbols, place names, cartoons, corporate logos, historical detail, swear words and other, more impressionistic noticings.
Don't they see that, in Strauss's words, "historical objectivity" requires "calling a spade a spade"?
Do you think that the historical origins of words like "blitzkrieg" and "ghetto" become endangered by the more general meanings they've evolved into?
Saturating himself in historical receptivity, using words as 'the hooks-and-eyes of memory' (as Coleridge put it), Heaney has created a marvellous original renovation.
