What can we hope to learn about the processes of social innovation and legitimation by studying the key words we use to construct and appraise the social world itself? This is the question I confront in the course of the present chapter. The question is obviously a vast and intractable one, and in order to make it manageable I shall concentrate on one recent and highly influential study that has focused on the links between linguistic and social change. The work I have in mind – which I shall use as a stalking-horse in what follows – is Raymond Williams's Keywords. It is Williams's central contention that a study of ‘variations and confusions of meaning’ may help us to improve our understanding of matters of ‘historical and contemporary substance’. If we take ‘certain words at the level at which they are generally used’ and scrutinise their developing structures of meaning ‘in and through historical time’, we may be able ‘to contribute certain kinds of awareness’ to current social and political debates, and in particular an ‘extra edge of consciousness’. But what kinds of awareness can we hope to attain from studying the history of key words? And how should we conduct our studies in order to ensure that this extra edge of consciousness is duly acquired? These are the questions I should like to examine at somewhat greater length.