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meanness of spirit; Paradise, in the oriental tongues, meant only a royal park; regeneration was spoken by the Greeks only of the earth in spring time, and of the recollection of forgotten knowledge; sacrament and mystery are words "fetched from the very dregs of paganism" to set forth the great truths of our redemption. On the other hand, thief, (Anglo-Saxon, theow) formerly signified only one of the servile classes; and villain, or villein, meant peasant, — the serf who under the feudal system was adscriptus glebae.

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was one of many; insolent meant unusual; silly, blessed, — the infant Jesus being termed by an old poet “that harmless silly babe;" officious signified ready to do kindly offices. Demure was once used in a good sense. Facetious, which now has the sense of buffoonish, originally meant urbane. Idiot, from the Greek, originally signified only a private man, as distinguished from an office holder. Homely formerly meant secret and familiar; and brat, now a vulgar and contemptuous word, had anciently a very different signification, as in the following lines from an old hymn by Gascoigne :

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“O Israel, O household of the Lord,

O Abraham's brats, O brood of blessed seed,
O chosen sheep that loved the Lord indeed.”

Imp once meant graft; Bacon speaks of "those most virtuous and goodly young imps, the Duke of Sussex and his brother." A boor was once only a farmer; a scamp a campdeserter. Speculation first meant the sense of sight; as in Shakespeare,

“Thou hast no speculation in those eyes."

Next it was metaphorically transferred to mental vision, and finally denoted without a metaphor, the reflections and theories of philosophers. From the domain of philosophy it has traveled downwards to the offices of stock-jobbers, sharebrokers, and all men who get their living by their wits, instead of by the sweat of their brows. Cunning once conveyed no idea of sinister or crooked wisdom. "The three Persons of the Trinity," says a reverent writer of the

fifteenth century, "are of equal cunning." Bacon, a century later, used the word in its present sense of a fox-like wisdom; and Locke calls it the "ape of wisdom."

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"Paramour meant originally a lover; a minion was a favorite; and knave, the lowest and most contemptuous term we can use when insulting another, signified originally, as knabe still does in German, a "boy." Subsequently it meant servant; thus Paul, in Wickliffe's version of the New Testament, reverently terms himself "a knave of Jesus Christ." A similar parallel to this is the word varlet which is the same as valet. Retaliate, from the Latin "re" (back) and "talis " (such), naturally means to pay back in kind, or such as we have received. But as, according to Sir Thomas More, men write their injuries in marble, the kindnesses done them in sand, the word "retaliate" is applied only to offenses or indignities, and never to favors. The word resent, to feel in return, has undergone a similar deterioration. Gossip (God-akin) once meant a sponsor in baptism.

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"There are some words which, though not used in an absolutely unfavorable sense, yet require a qualifying adjective, to be understood favorably. Thus, if a man is said to be noted for his curiosity, a prying impertinent, not a legitimate, curiosity is supposed to be meant. So critic and criticise are commonly associated with a carping and fault-finding disposition. Parson, (persona ecclesiae), had originally no undertone of contempt. In the eighteenth century it had become a nickname of scorn; and it was at a party of a dozen parsons that the Earl of Sandwich won his wager, that no one among them had brought his prayer-book, or forgotten his cork-screw. *

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By a fast man I presume you mean a loose one,' said Sir Robert Inglis to one who was describing a rake. Of all the words which have degenerated from their original meaning, the most remarkable is the term dunce, of the history of which Archbishop Trench has given a striking account in his work on "The Study of Words." In the middle ages, certain theologians, educated in the cathedral and cloister schools founded by Charlemagne and his successors, were called schoolmen. Though they were men of great acuteness and subtlety

of intellect, their works, at the revival of learning, ceased to be popular, and it was considered a mark of intellectual progress and advance to have thrown off their yoke. Some persons, however, still clung to these schoolmen, especially to Duns Scotus, the great teacher of the Franciscan order; and many times an adherent of the old learning would seek to strengthen his position by an appeal to its great doctor, familiarly called Duns; while his opponents would contemptuously rejoin, “Oh, you are a Duns-man," or more briefly, "You are a Duns." As the new learning was enlisting more and more of the scholarship of the age on its side, the title became more and more a term of scorn, and thus from the long extinct conflict between the old and the new learning, the mediæval and the modern theology, we inherit the word dunce" and duncery." The lot of poor Duns, as the Archbishop observes, was certainly a hard one. That the name of the "Subtle Doctor," as he was called, one of the keenest and most subtlewitted of men, according to Hooker, "the wittiest of the school divines," should become a mere synonym for stupidity, was a fate of which even his bitterest enemies would never have dreamed.

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"Saunterers were once pilgrims to the Holy Land (la Sainte Terre) who, it was found, took their own time to go there. Bit is that which has been bit off, and exactly corresponds to the word "morsel," used in the same sense, and from the Latin, mordere, to bite. Bankrupt means literally broken bench. It was the custom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for the Lombard merchants to expose their wares for sale in the market-place on benches. When one of the number failed, all the other merchants set upon him, drove him from the market and broke his bench to pieces. Banco rotto, the Italian for bench-broken, becomes banqueroute in French, and in English, bankrupt. Alligator is from the Spanish el lagarto, "the lizard," being the largest of the lizard species. Stipulation is from stipulum, a straw, which the Romans broke when they made a mutual engagement. Dexterity is simply right-handedness. Mountebank means a quack-medicine vender, - from the Italian, montare, to mount, and banco, a

bench. Literally, one who mounts a bench to boast of his infallible skill in curing disease. Quandary is a corruption of the French qu'en dirai (je)? "what shall I say of it?" and expresses that feeling of uncertainty which would naturally prompt such a question. Faint is from the French se feindre, to pretend; so that originally faintness was a pretended weakness or inability. We have an example of the thing originally indicated by the word, in the French theaters, where professional fainters are employed, whose business it is to be overcome and sink to the floor under the powerful acting of the tragedians.

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"Topsy-turvy is said to be a contraction of "top-side t'other-way," just as helter-skelter is from hilariter et celeriter, gaily and quickly," * The tendency to regard money as the source of true happiness is strikingly illustrated in the source of the word wealth, which is connected with weal, just as the Latin beatus meant both blessed and rich, and the same is true of the Greek. * * * The term blue-stocking, applied to literary ladies, has a curious origin. Originally, in England, in 1760, it was conferred on a society of literary persons of both sexes. The society derived its name from the blue worsted stockings always worn by Benjamin Stillingfleet, a distinguished writer who was one of the most active promoters of the association. This term was subsequently conferred on literary bodies, from the fact that the accomplished and fascinating Mrs. Jerningham wore blue stockings at the social and literary entertainments given by Lady Montague. Woman is the wif or web-man, who stays at home to spin, as distinguished from the weap-man, who goes abroad to use the weapons of war. [Note also the word wife, from this source.] The term man" is, of course, generic, including both male and female. Lady primarily signifies bread-keeper. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, hlafdie, i. e. hlafweardige, bread-keeper, from hlaf, bread, loaf, and weardian, to keep, look after. Waist is the same as waste; that part of the figure which wastes, that is, dimin

ishes.

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"Canard has a very curious origin. M. Quetelet, a French writer, attributes the first application of this term to Norbert Cornellisen, who, to give a sly hit at the ridiculous pieces of intelligence in the public journals, stated that an interesting experiment had just been made calculated to prove the voracity of ducks. Twenty were placed together; and one of them having been killed and cut up into the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all, was thrown to the other nineteen, and most gluttonously gobbled up. Another was then taken from the nineteen, and being chopped small like its predecessor, was served up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other; and so on to the last, who thus was placed in the position of having eaten his nineteen companions. This story, most pleasantly narrated, ran the rounds of all the journals of Europe. It then became almost forgotten for about a score of years, when it went back from America with amplifications; but the word remained in its novel signification. Poltroon is pollice truncus, that is, with the thumb cut off, pollex, Latin, meaning thumb, and truncus, maimed or mutilated. When the Roman empire was about falling to pieces, the valor of the citizens had so degenerated, that, to escape fighting, many cut off their right thumbs, thus disabling themselves from using the pike.”

And thus we might go on for hundreds of pages citing peculiar meanings, curious derivations, strange mutations, and queer associations of words with ideas more or less congruous or compatible; but enough has been given to illustrate the fact that even though the study of the etymology of words is intensely interesting for its own sake, it is not necessary, or even particularly advantageous, to an English writer, because so many words have now a changed meaning, while others have become restricted to a small fraction of their original import.

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