Every course runs on a hidden tax. Somewhere around week two, a reading reaches for terms like hegemony or reflexivity or performativity without pausing, and a portion of the room quietly decides not to ask what those words mean. The reluctance is understandable (and even something that a faculty member can empathize with) — asking what a word means can feel like confessing what you don’t know, in front of the people you least want to confess it to. But the cost compounds over time: readings skimmed, seminars sat out, arguments half-followed. Vocabulary is the cheapest thing in academic life to fix, and the most embarrassing to ask about. I’ve often faced the same issue as a student myself.
The document embedded below is my attempt to take the embarrassment out of the equation. A Working Lexicon collects three hundred or so words that do heavy lifting in sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, and the humanities at large. Each entry gives the word’s roots, a working definition, a sentence showing it at work, and — where a term is regularly misused — a caution: significant is not “important,” performative does not mean “insincere,” and begging the question is not raising one. The front matter adds a table of recurring Greek and Latin root families, notes on pronouncing the names everyone mangles (Geertz rhymes with “hurts”), and a complete index. The anchors deliberately reach beyond the usual canon — Ambedkar beside Weber, Oyěwùmí beside Butler. And yes, it is typeset like a Victorian dictionary; a reference work should be a small pleasure to open.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did use Claude’s Fable 5 model to help me with putting this together, but I’ve done my best to audit it as thoroughly as possible. If you, as a user, find any mistakes in it, please feel free to reach out to me. After all, vocabulary is a commons, and commons are maintained by argument.
Use this document in the way that you would use any dictionary: without ceremony, and without anyone watching. If a certain non-contextual word or term in a Sociological/Anthropological/STS-ey article holds you up, the odds are decent that it is here.
(N.B: If you’re accessing this page on a phone, click here.)