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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2024 13:11:24 +1300
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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.