Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has alway… - John Rupert Firth

Research into the detailed contextual distribution of sociologically important words, what one might call focal or pivotal words, is only just beginning.

Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context.

The study of such words as work, labour, trade, employ, occupy, play, leisure, time, hours, means, self-respect, in all their derivatives and compounds in sociologically significant contexts during the last twenty years would be quite enlightening. So would the study of words particularly associated with the dress, occupations, and ambitions of women, or the language of advertising, especially of quackery, entertainments, food, drink, or of political movements and propaganda.