ABSTRACT
From its inception, the English word composition, as old as the English language, has accommodated an unusual elasticity, ranging from high art to natural process. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as early as 1682, a lecturer on plant anatomy acknowledged compositional principles both in human inventions, like words, and natural objects, like bodies: “The Composition of Atomes in Bodies is like that of Letters, in Words.” From the 16th century on, principles of composition were finding their way into the natural laws of logic, math, physics, and chemistry. In the craft arts, Morley was tying composition to musical art and Dryden, a century later, to painting. Grammatical composition was also making its way into the English language, with Thomas Wilson’s 1560 observation in The Art of Rhetoric: “Composicion… is an apte joynyng together of wordes in suche order, that neither the eare shal spie any jerre, nor yet any man shalbe dulled with overlong drawing out of a sentence” (original spellings preserved in the OED; edited and reprinted in Medine 1994, p. 192).
