Читать книгу Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society - Raymond Williams - Страница 35

A convention was originally a coming together or assembly, from fw convention, F, conventionem, L – assembly, rw convenire, L – to come together. As such it has been used in English since C16, and is still quite often used in this sense. There is a natural extension of use to mean an agreement, and this has been common in English since C15.

The more difficult uses of convention and especially conventional relate to an extension of the sense of agreement to something implicitly customary or agreed, and to a different kind of extension, especially in literature and art, to an implicit agreed method. The extension to the sense of custom is from lC18. It was important in the political controversy about rights, which ironically were being elsewhere (in the United States and France) formally defined by Conventions. But its most common use was in questions of manners and behaviour, and an unfavourable sense soon appeared, in which conventional meant artificial or formal, and by derivation merely old-fashioned. Complaints against conventions and conventional ideas can be readily found from mC19 onwards. Most of the early special uses in art and literature are in the same sense, as part of a normal ROMANTIC (q.v.) preference for spontaneity and innovation. But a more technical sense, in which it was seen that all forms of art contain fundamental and often only implicit conventions of method and purpose, is also evident from mC19 and has since been important in specialized discussion. The degree of formality originally important in convention is now almost wholly lost, except in this specialized use. In normal use convention is indeed the opposite of formal agreement, and can be used quite neutrally. Conventional, however, usually expresses the unfavourable sense. On the other hand, after the invention of the atom and hydrogen bombs, conventional weapons were favourably contrasted (from c. 1950) with nuclear weapons.

See CONSENSUS