Sum Literatus

I have been wondering lately, and the nature of these wonderings should tell the reader all he ever need know about the way my mind works. I have been wondering about the role of linguistics in philology. 

I am a scholar; I call myself a philologist.* My passion is for words and their meaning. Where exactly does meaning lie? When do ink marks on a page form letters, and when do those letters form meaningful words - can words on their own be meaningful, or do they require a greater context?

Yes, I am a nerd. I'm fine with that. I study what fascinates me, and these studies draw my time and attention as irresistibly as flowers draw bees. (Given my habit of forgetting to eat and sleep while I work, the flower in question may be more akin to a Venus' fly-trap rather than, say, a daisy.)

But I have no interest in linguistics. On a good day, I could give a hazy kinda-sorta definition of a phoneme, maybe. I don't know what a transitive passive verb form is, nor a "1sg (pronomial) possessor NP with a 3sg non-pronomial possessor NP."** Nor do I care. 

I am vaguely aware that this probably makes me a bad, lazy or selfish scholar. But, my lazy, selfish scholar counters, how do experts get to be experts if not by focussing on what fascinates them? And technical linguistics bores me immensely.

However, linguistics does fall under the general heading of philology. Lately, philology has come to mean the study of words in the context I use - that of words and their meaning. But the technical heading still applies.

So here is my dilemma: do I bore myself with linguistics, thus rounding out my philology? or do I ignore linguistics, possibly selling myself short on information, and instead delight in the discovery that the OED lists Shakespeare as the probable neologist behind generous and other such surprises?

My hope is to aim for a happy middle ground, perhaps more on the side of meaning-weighted philology than exactly in the center, but one which acknowledges the existence and possible value of basic linguistic study while spending the majority of my academic energy on my chosen field of eventual expertise.

*Sentence structure borrowed from Laurie R. King's excellent Beekeeper's Apprentice series, exact book unknown. This citation is probably not important, but I like to give credit where credit is due, at least if it's something worthwhile.

**Actual quote from UPenn's Language Log.