"'Society', its derivative 'social' and the rise of the antonym 'antisocial'"

My aim in this chapter is to consider the word SOCIETY and its derivative SOCIAL as discussed by Geoffrey Hughes over their history and as they have been used in a mainly British context since the publication of Words in Time in 1988 and to highlight the semantic ambivalence in their use. Reference will also be made to the work of one of Hughes’s most illustrious predecessors in writing a social history of English, Raymond Williams, together with Hughes’s and Williams’s successors – Bennett, Grossberg and Morris (2005) – editors of New Keywords. The rise in recent years of the antonym ANTISOCIAL, particularly as expressed in the acronym ASBO (ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR ORDER), is also of particular interest and worthy of attention. While it is not directly mentioned in the title, some attention will also be paid to the word SOCIALIST.