Air and Manner

AIR/Manières is one of the first ‘synonym’ articles that Diderot contributed to the first volume of the Encyclopédie. These ‘synonyms’, on which both D’Alembert and Jaucourt later worked and which were often taken from abbé Girard’s treatise, constitute the first appearance of ordinary language in a dictionary that was originally only supposed to deal with science, arts and craft. The article Air/manières enables us to raise a large number of the questions posed by the Encyclopédie’s approach to synonymy and helps us to understand some of the editorial and philosophical issues involved.