Anonymity : The Literary History of a Word

THE ADJECTIVE ANONYMOUS, which eventually gave us the noun anonymity, was brought into English from Greek in the late sixteenth century when it often showed off its learned source by its spelling anonymos. It was almost always used to describe a piece of writing or its author, and seems to have carried no generally held associations beyond the translation of its Greek root: without name. It stayed close to this lexical meaning until the first half of the twentieth century. Still, by the 1830s the accumulated changes in the cultural assumptions about writers and writings that are without name expanded the implications of the adjective. Then in the early twentieth century, new meanings, some of them expressed by uses of anonymous to describe things unrelated to authorship, began to rub off on the adjective from the noun formed by the addition of a suffix.

A noun made from an adjective belongs to a general class whose work is not mainly or usually to change the semantic role, that is, the root meaning, but to shift the grammatical class of the root (as in sad, sadness). In the first instances when anonymity appeared in English, which was not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century and then only rarely, and for more than fifty years after, it seems to have done just that work: to have been used only to describe authors or their writings in the state of being anonymous, of not being known by a name. The early history of the noun anonymity parallels closely the concurrent history of its root adjective.

Adjectival nouns formed by adding the particular suffix ity (usually of classical or French origin) belong to a subset of the general class by being specially associated with what linguists call greater "lexicalization," or "vocabulary construction"; when such nouns are formed, something new in the language "has come into existence which did not exist before," so that their full meanings cannot be recovered from their formation. These nouns, then, can be powerfully compact signals of cultural changes because of the "concentration of presupposition that is packed into a lexicalization by the time it is successfully institutionalized." ¹ The adjectival noun anonymity demonstrates this process of word-making: it was institutionalized in the early twentieth century.

The origin and history of this noun constitute a minuscule model of the sorts of energetic transactions that take place over time among words, poems, other writings, and the pressures in the culture that produces and is produced by them. This model also shapes the discussion here. Its line of argument will trace the literary history of a noun—together with its parent adjective—which has by now become so packed with presuppositions and preoccupations that we can often sense the structure of feelings associated with it to be present even in contexts where the word is not explicitly used. Poems are the spaces where this model can best be demonstrated, because in them the accumulated force of its concentration of meanings can be felt most powerfully.

Anonymous: Its Root Meaning

Like vast numbers of other words englished in the sixteenth century, anonymous was imported to serve a newly felt need. It became a conventional shorthand—soon abbreviated anon.—to sign writings whose authors were unknown, particularly poems that were for the first time offered in print to a public who had not had access to them when they were passed in manuscript among privileged circles of readers who might know their authorship without needing to be told.

The term anonymous seems not to have been known to Richard Tottel in 1557 when he put into print for the first time a miscellany of poems from such a manuscript. In it he grouped unassigned entries under the heading "Vncertain auctors," itself a borrowing from signatures already used in manuscripts: Incertus author, Jncerti Authoris, the autor unsertayn. ² In miscellanies of the 1570s, many poems were printed with—in place of the author's...