integer = c lg n (inputs of size n, Cormen 3rd, page 23)?
lg n is the base-2 logarithm of n, satisfying 2^lg n = n, so about lg n bits (ceil lg n to be exact) are needed for integers that can represent 0..n-1, which suffices for pointers into the input. The authors of CLRS are saying that the word size should be about this much (c lg n). This is arguably reasonable because c lg n-bit words index storage of n^c (so any polynomial in n), and c lg n-bit operations can be synthesized from lg n-bit operations in constant time. If we make the word size much bigger, then the implied data-parallelism starts to distort running times.

The mathematical preliminaries here should be covered in an intro discrete mathematics class.