in this sense from a comparable origin, vulgus, L – the common people). It is difficult to date the derogatory sense of common. In feudal society the attribution was systematic and carried few if any additional overtones. It is significant that members of the Parliamentary army in the Civil War of mC17 refused to be called common soldiers and insisted on private soldiers. This must indicate an existing and significant derogatory sense of common, though it is interesting that this same army were fighting for the commons and went on to establish a commonwealth. The alternative they chose is remarkable, since it asserted, in the true spirit of their revolution, that they were their own men. There is a great deal of social history in this transfer across the range of ordinary description from common to private: in a way the transposition of hitherto opposed meanings, becoming private soldiers in a common cause. In succeeding British armies, private has been deprived of this significance and reduced to a technical term for those of lowest rank.
It is extremely difficult, from lC16 on, to distinguish relatively neutral uses of common, as in common ware, from more conscious and yet vaguer uses to mean vulgar, unrefined and eventually low-class. Certainly the clear derogatory use seems to increase from eC19, in a period of more conscious and yet less specific class-distinction (cf. CLASS). By lC19 ‘her speech was very common’ has an unmistakable ring, and this use has persisted over a wide range of behaviour. Meanwhile other senses, both neutral and positive, are also in general use. People, sometimes the same people, say ‘it’s common to eat ice-cream in the street’ (and indeed it is becoming common in another sense); but also ‘it’s common to speak of the need for a common effort’ (which may indeed be difficult to get if many of the people needed to make it are seen as common).
See CLASS, FOLK, MASSES, ORDINARY, POPULAR, PRIVATE
Communication in its most general modern meaning has been in the language since C15. Its fw is communicacion, oF, from communicationem, L, a noun of action from the stem of the past participle of communicare, L, from rw communis, L – common: hence communicate – make common to many, impart. Communication was first this action, and then, from lC15, the object thus made common: a communication. This has remained its main range of use. But from lC17 there was an important extension to the means of communication, specifically in such phrases as lines of communication. In the main period of development of roads, canals and railways, communications was often the abstract general term for these physical facilities. It was in C20, with the development of other means of passing information and maintaining social contact, that communications came also and perhaps predominantly to refer to such MEDIA (q.v.) as the press and broadcasting, though this use (which is earlier in USA than in UK) is not settled before mC20. The communications industry, as it is now called, is thus usually distinguished from the transport industry: communications for information and ideas, in print and broadcasting; transport for the physical carriage of people and goods.
In controversy about communications systems and communication theory it is often useful to recall the unresolved range of the original noun of action, represented at its extremes by transmit, a one-way process, and share (cf. communion and especially communicant), a common or mutual process. The intermediate senses – make common to many, and impart – can be read in either direction, and the choice of direction is often crucial. Hence the attempt to generalize the distinction in such contrasted phrases as manipulative communication(s) and participatory communication(s).
See COMMON
Communism and communist emerged, as words, in mC19. Their best-known origins, on a European scale, are the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels in 1848 and the associated Communist League. But the word had been in use for some time before this. The London Communist Propaganda Society was founded in 1841, by Goodwyn Barmby, and there is an evident connection in this use with communion: ‘the Communist gives (the Communion Table) a higher signification, by holding it as a type of that holy millennial communitive life’. Given the affinities and overlaps of the words deriving from COMMON (q.v.), this range is understandable, and certain connections were deliberately made by Christian utopian socialists. The overlap with secular and republican terminology, basically derived from the French Revolution, is also evident. Barmby claimed that he ‘first pronounced the name of Communism which has since … acquired that world-wide reputation’. This had been in 1840, but significantly ‘in conversation with some of the most advanced minds of the French metropolis’ and in particular ‘in the company of some disciples of Babeoeuf (sic) then called Equalitarians’. Communiste is recorded in a use by Cabet, also in 1840, and communisme and communism (in English also communionism) followed quickly in the same decade. In France and Germany, but not in England, communist became a harder word than SOCIALIST (q.v.). Engels later explained that he and Marx could not have called the Communist Manifesto ‘a Socialist manifesto’, because one was a working-class, the other a middle-class movement; ‘socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite’. The modern distinction between communist and socialist is often read back to this period, but this is misleading. It is not only that socialism and socialist were more widely used, in Marxist as in other parties, but that communist was still quite widely understood, in English, in association with community and thus with experiments in common property. In English, in the 1880s, socialism was almost certainly the harder word, since it was unambiguously linked, for all its varying tendencies, to reorganization of the society as a whole. Communist was used in a modern sense after the example of the Paris Commune of 1870, but significantly was challenged by some as inaccurate; the real word for that was communard. William Morris in the 1890s expressed his opposition to Fabian Socialism in the explicit terms of Communism and Communist.
Yet the predominant general term was still socialism until the Russian Revolution. In 1918 the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was changed in name, by its now dominant Bolshevik section, to the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and nearly all modern usage follows from this. The renaming reached back to the distinction felt by Marx and Engels, and to the Paris Commune, but it was an act of historical reconstitution of the word, rather than of steady continuity. Within this tradition communism was now a higher stage beyond socialism, through which, however, it must pass. But this has had less effect on general meanings than the distinction which followed 1918 (though with many earlier substantial if not nominal precedents) between REVOLUTIONARY and DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS (qq.v.). Subsequent splits in the communist movement have produced further variations, though communist is most often used of parties linked to Soviet definitions, and variants of revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist have been common to describe alternative or dissident communist parties.
One particularly difficult use, in this complex and intensely controversial history, is that of Marxist. Virtually all the revolutionary socialist parties and groups, including the Communist Parties, claim to be Marxist, though in controversy they often deny this title to other competing parties of the same general kind. From outside the socialist movement, marxist has also been widely used; partly as a catch-all description of the varying revolutionary socialist and communist parties and groups; partly as a way
