EVERYONE READING THIS volume, or so I imagine, knows that addictive pleasure of looking up a word in a dictionary and emerging, perhaps hours later, with any number of paths taken, redoubled, veered from, and lost along. Online tools have made that all the easier, and more swiftly immersive. The activity is both current and dredged in history: search engines have long existed, just in different forms and media. The implications for reading, for hermeneutics, for epistemology have again long been recognized to be at the core of pedagogy, and hence of what it is to study, and of what one studies and why. Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae sive origines (Etymologies or Origins) compiled in the early seventh century and the OED's online riches belong to a history of word study in which a kind of obsessive curiosity about lexical connections passes down centuries. If modern historical linguists think about etymology in different ways from Isidore, with their careful scientific tracking of phoneme shifts back some 5,500 years to proto-Indo-European, then modern literary scholars and theorists of language perhaps share more of the playful enjoyment of puns, linguistic oddities and solecisms, strange histories of meaning and extrapolation that characterize Isidore's voluminous musings. They also develop architecturally complex theories and terminologies to describe lexical connectivity, of which intertextuality and deconstruction are perhaps the most intensely self-questioning yet mundanely collapsible.

The four words explored in this section, consent, entente, pite, and slider, inhabit many forms of connectivity. Each essay explores patterns of meaning traced through Chaucer's writings in slightly different ways though with a similar methodology: the use of dictionaries and concordances. Somerset's tracking of consent finds it to be part of an assonantal pairing with assent: at key moments in the Canterbury Talesand in Troilus and Criseyde, characters are shown to be put under various kinds of pressure to agree or assert, yet without seeming to show due caution for where such assent might lead them. It turns out that Chaucer repeatedly plays with the sound not only of assent and consent but also with the further rhyme entente; a neat trio of chiming, colliding proximities that draws the audience's attention to a web of fluctuating situations playing off coercion and acceptance, resistance and compliance.