"Etymological" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fostering the growth of mind. How can an inanimate, mechanical Gerund-grinder, the like of whom will, in a subsequent century, be manufactured at Nurnberg out of wood and leather, foster the growth of anything; much more of Mind, which grows, not like a vegetable (by having its roots littered with etymological compost), but like a spirit, by mysterious contact of Spirit; Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought? How shall he give kindling, in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag Professors knew ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... called by the Moguls Monhe-Dhot (eternal sanctuary). Although averse to any unnecessary change in the received orthography of proper names, we have adopted M. Huc's mode of spelling, in the case of the capital of Thibet, as there appear to be etymological reasons ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... proletarian government. He once described the Soviet as "a true, unadulterated democracy," but, unless we are to dismiss the description as idle and vain rhetoric, we must assume that the word "democracy" was used in an entirely new sense, utterly incompatible with its etymological and historical meaning. Democracy has always meant absence of class rule; ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... Paris MS. is the Picard dialect of the former half of the fourteenth century. The French of Caxton's book retains many of the original north-eastern forms, but is to a considerable extent modernized and assimilated to the literary language of a later period. Such 'etymological' spellings as recepueur, debuoit, are common in Caxton's text, but rarely occur in Michelant. The following comparative specimen of the two versions will afford some notion of the orthographical and grammatical differences ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... etymological point of view, the truth is just the other way about. Priest is old Presbyter ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... peerage policy. The fourteenth century which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal" does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... everything—from the etymological subtleties of the French language down to the chaste reluctances of female moles. He touched everything and he touched nothing ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... week before the masters of grammar.[1] To these books should be added a dictionary, with some peculiar and quaint etymologies, by Papias the Lombard; grammatical works by John Garland; Bishop Hugutio's etymological dictionary (c. 1192); a dreary hexameter poem by Alexander Gallus, the Breton Friar (d. 1240)—"the olde Doctrinall, with his diffuse and unperfite brevitie"; Eberhard's similar poem (c. 1212), called Graecismus, because it includes a chapter on derivations ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... his age, and from his to the present: with notes explanatory of customs, &c., and references to Boccace, and other authours from whom he has borrowed, with an account of the liberties he has taken in telling the stories; his life, and an exact etymological glossary. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... and, according to Murray, "Egremauncy occurs about 1649 in Grebory's Chron. Camd. Soc. 1876, 183." Mr. Payne, however, in a letter to me, observes that the word is merely an ignorant corruption of "negromancy," itself a corruption of a corruption it is "not fit for decent (etymological) society." ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... tower was erected, it was the subject of much criticism, especially from the witty pen of C. L. Dodgson, the world-famous creator of /Alice in Wonderland/. The opening paragraph is a fair specimen: "Of the etymological significance of the new belfry, Christ Church. "The word 'belfry' is derived from the French '/bel/— beautiful, meet,' and from the German '/frei/—free, unfettered, safe.' Thus the word is strictly equivalent to 'meat-safe,' to which ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... out of moist and plastic clay, the fires of reed and broken wood lighted on these simple hearths reddened and hardened the clay till it became like rock. Some bystander more observant than the rest noted the change and became the father of ceramics. We use the word in its widest, in its etymological sense. Ceramics is the art of fashioning clay and burning it in the fire so as to obtain constructive materials, domestic utensils, or ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... empty) keeps the etymological idea through all changes of meaning; a vain endeavor is empty of result, or of adequate power to produce a result, a vain pretension is empty or destitute of support, a vain person has a conceit that is empty or destitute ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... few minutes—"well, however good the invention was, the idea is not entirely new, for the Greeks esteemed eating and drinking plentifully, a sort of offering to the gods; and Aristotle explains the very word, THoinai, or feasts, by an etymological exposition, 'that it was thought a duty to the gods to be drunk;' no bad idea of our classical patterns of antiquity. Polypheme, too, in the Cyclops of Euripides, no doubt a very sound theologian, says, his stomach is his only ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the future, writing about the nineteenth century, will, I sometimes fancy, find a new meaning in a familiar phrase. It is the custom to call this the most "Democratic" age the world has ever seen, and most of us are beguiled by the etymological contrast, and the memory of certain legislative revolutions, to oppose one form of stupidity prevailing to another, and to fancy we mean the opposite to an "Aristocratic" period. But indeed we do not. So far as ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... wine is forbidden not only to Brahmans but the two other orders as well.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} So it clearly appears derogatory to the dignity of the Gods to have received a nymph so pernicious, who ought rather to have been made over to the Titans. However the etymological fancy has prevailed. The word Sura, a God, is derived from the indeclinable Swar ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... ineffectual study, trying to perfect myself in the terminology of the science of Fashion. I have listened attentively, and have gathered into a retentive memory sundry technicalities; but in vain have I submitted these terms of a strange dialect to the strictest etymological research. In vain have I conversed upon this subject with the most intelligent dry-goods dealers. In learning the few idiomatic phrases they employ, I have experienced only the satisfaction which young students ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... of the etymological issues can be found in a paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, "Entomology of the Computer Bug: History and Folklore", ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... finally the occurrence of cases of Berserker madness and cannibalism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucinations, being interpreted as due to such demoniacal metamorphosis, gave rise to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The etymological proceedings, to which Mr. Cox would incontinently ascribe the origin of the entire superstition, seemed to me to have played a very subordinate part in the matter. To suppose that Jean Grenier imagined himself to be a wolf, because the Greek ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... that of all civilized peoples on the globe, must be thoroughly recast, not only in its philological and etymological character, but in its ideologic, etiologic, and other significations, before we can successfully fall back on an antecedent cause without an effect, or an effect without an antecedent cause. Besides, the human mind would have to undergo as complete a subversion of structure as language itself, before ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... can understand how it was possible that the most learned scholars at the close of the republic were so desperately ignorant concerning old Roman religion. In regard to many of the old Roman gods they know absolutely nothing, and try to disguise their ignorance behind a show of learning based on etymological sleight-of-hand; in regard to the rest their information is so tangled with Greek ideas that it is often almost impossible to unravel the mass and separate the old from the new. This unravelling has been the tedious ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... More than this, he had almost as little belief in the utility of the Conventions[28] as Grey had in those of his epoch. Whether the Boers did, or did not, call the Queen "Suzerain" seemed to him to be a small matter—an etymological question, as he afterwards called it. What was essential was that men of British blood should not be kept under the heel of the Dutch. Moreover, the grievances for which the observance of the London Convention, however ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... indifferently to herbalists as bishop-weed and gout-weed. It has now long since ceased to be a recognised member of the British Pharmacopoeia, but, having overrun our lanes and thickets in its flush period, it remains to this day a visible botanical and etymological memento of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... are the most interesting personages alive; but onlookers regard them partly with amusement, partly with pity, partly with compassion—in the etymological ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... may be said, to have the historical sense in full measure without having ever, both literally and figuratively, wiped away the dust from original documents—that is, without having discovered and restored them for oneself. We need not interpret in the Jewish or etymological sense the dictum of Renan: "I do not think it possible for any one to acquire a clear notion of history, its limits, and the amount of confidence to be placed in the different categories of historical investigation, unless he is in the habit of handling ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... of the phaenomena of nature for which we have no exact English name. The nearest approximation to a name for what I mean which we possess is physical geography; the Germans have a better, 'Erdkunde' (earth knowledge or geology in its etymological sense), that is to say, a general knowledge of the earth, and what is on it and in it and about it. If anyone who has experience of the ways of young children will call to mind their questions, he will find that ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... of St. Peter. And all the other instances of its use lie in these three letters—the one to Titus and two to Timothy; and eight of them are in this first one. The old Apostle keeps perpetually recurring to this one idea of 'godliness.' What does he mean by it? The etymological meaning of the word is 'well-directed reverence,' but it is to be noticed that the context specifically points to one form of well-directed reverence, viz. as shown in conduct. 'Active godliness' is the meaning of the word; religion embodied ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... says that this passage smacks rather of Proclus, than of Euripides, and I agree with him that its spuriousness is more than probable. Had Euripides designed an etymological quibble, he would probably have made some allusion to Merus, a mountain of India, where Bacchus is said to have been brought up. See Curtius, viii. 10. "Sita est sub radicibus montis, quem Meron incolae appellant. Inde Graeci mentiendi traxere licentiam, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... Orkneys—but the name is unknown in the Long Island—that I am about to describe lies less than half a mile above the shepherd's house; but so little curiosity had that individual that he was entirely unacquainted with it; and I believe it would never have been found by us but for a little terrier (in its etymological sense, of course) of a daughter. The child was only acquainted with the two here drawn [of which the other—viz., Uamh Sgalabhad, is here reproduced as Plate I., frontispiece]; but there may be many more waiting the researches of the zealous ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... combination of letters represents a special sound, the name should be spelt with T only. But the present fashion of thus writing it in Latin, German, French, and other languages, which generally maintain the etymological spelling, is intolerable: The name is Greek, and was placed on the calendar in honour of a noble Spanish lady, St. Therasia, who became the wife of a Saint, Paulinus of Nola, and a Saint herself. See Sainte Therese, Lettres au R. P. Bouix, by the Abbe Postel, Paris, 1864. The derivation ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... bearing. Eight of these new titles were instituted by Temmu, namely, mahito, asomi, sukune, imiki, michi-no-shi, omi, muraji, and inagi, and their nearest English equivalents are, perhaps, duke, marquis, count, lord, viscount, baron, and baronet. It is unnecessary to give any etymological analysis of these terms; their order alone is important. But two points have to be noted. The first is that the title imiki was generally that chosen for bestowal on naturalized foreigners; the second, that a conspicuously low place in the list is given ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... be warned by the footprints of time, Mrs. Eddy pauses in her revision of Genesis to wonder "whence came the wife of Cain?" But on the whole she profits by the story of Cain, for here she finds one of those little etymological clews which never escape her penetration. The fact that Adam and all his race were but a dream of mortal mind is proved, she says, by the fact that Cain went "to dwell in the land of Nod, the land of dreams and illusions." Mrs. Eddy offers this ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... One of the names of the Indian Siva is Dionichi, which very nearly resembles the Greek name of Bacchus, Dionysos. He was taken from the Meros, or thigh of Jupiter. Now Mount Meru, in India, is the home of the gods; by a common etymological error the Greeks may have thought it the Greek word for thigh, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... writers deliberately to "whitewash" the gods of popular religion. Systematic explanations of the sacred stories, whether as preserved in poetry or as told by priests, had to be provided. India had her etymological and her legendary school of mythology.(1) Thus, while the hymn SEEMED to tell how the Maruts were gods, "born together with the spotted deer," the etymological interpreters explained that the word for deer only ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... [Footnote 98: Etymological Vocabulary of Geographical Names, appended to the last edition of Webster's Dictionary (1864). It may be proper to remark in this connection, that the writer's responsibility for the correctness of translations given in ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... roots, and at the same time to caution him against supposing that, because he knows the roots of a word, he necessarily knows the meaning of the word itself. Exercises are interspersed throughout this Part which can be worked out with, or without, an English Etymological Dictionary,[44] as the nature of the case may require. The exercises have not been selected at random; many of them have been subjected to the practical test of experience, and have been used in ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... possessed a copy of Bailey's 'Etymological Dictionary', a book published early in the eighteenth century. Over this I would pore for hours, playing with the words in a fashion which I can no longer reconstruct, and delighting in the savour of the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... flowers. There is a zantewood, or satinwood, but it does not take its name from this island. Poe associated the name of the island with the hyacinth, but there is no etymological connection. He probably derived his fancy from a passage in Chateaubriand's "Itineraire de ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... this spectral appearance believed in in Scotland, where the apparition is called Wraith, which word is defined in Jameson's Etymological Dictionary, published by ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... witness, in ages far remote, before the Celt, the Teuton, the Hellene, the Latin, the Slav, and the Indo-Iranian were known, to the existence of the family, with the mother occupying a high and honourable place, if not indeed the highest place of all. What the etymological meaning was, of the primitive Aryan word from which our mother is descended, is uncertain. It seems, however, to be a noun derived, with the agent-suffix -t-r, from the root ma, "to measure." Skeat thinks the word meant originally "manager, regulator [of the household]," ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... combine, however, the etymological meaning of criticism with that of aesthetics, we shall unite two essential qualities of the theory of beauty. Criticism implies judgment, and aesthetics perception. To get the common ground, that of perceptions which are critical, or judgments which are perceptions, we must widen our notion of ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... its being impressed most commonly with some head in contradistinction to the reverse, which, in latter times, was oftenest a cross. Thence the vulgarism, cross or pile, poll, head."—Cleland's Specimen of an Etymological Vocabulary, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... copies of the gardens that had been laid out in Babylonia long ages before. The very word "paradise," which in the Persian age came to signify a pleasure-park, was of Babylonian origin. It is given in the exercise-book of a Babylonian school-boy as the name of a mythical locality, and an etymological pun attempts to derive it from the name of ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... and psychologically unified juxtapositions as t'ien tsz "heaven son," i.e., "emperor," or shui fu "water man," i.e., "water carrier." In the latter case we may as well frankly write shui-fu as a single word, the meaning of the compound as a whole being as divergent from the precise etymological values of its component elements as is that of our English word typewriter from the merely combined values of type and writer. In English the unity of the word typewriter is further safeguarded by a predominant accent on the first syllable and by the possibility of adding such a suffixed ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... portal of the original sanctuary is still to be seen. But of the old castle not a trace remains; only its name survives,—la Hourquie,—with its significant etymological story: Horcae,—furcae,—- fourches patibulaires,—the gibbet. For these viscounts of Morlaaes had recourse to a savage expedient to control the lawlessness of their day. They kept a gallows-tree erect before the castle gateway, a speaking symbol of vengeance, and there the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... etymological sense of the word, always, rather than the political) is exemplified in the fiction of 1921, in that the humblest life as well as the highest offers matter for romance. More than in former years, writers seek out the romance that lies in the lives of the average man or woman. Having learned that ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the Bull then in that morning of the battle, so that he met the White-horned at Tarbga in Mag Ai; i.e. Tarbguba or Tarbgleo.[Note: 'Bull-Sorrow or Bull-Fight,' etymological explanation of Tarbga.] The first name of that hill was Roi Dedond. Every one who escaped in the fight was intent on nothing but beholding the ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... Gish-du-bar, but that we must read the first sign as Gish and the third as Mash, while for the second we must assume a reading Gn or Gi. This would give us Gish-g(n)-mash which is clearly again (like En-ki-d) not an etymological writing but a phonetic one, intended to convey an approach to the popular pronunciation. Gi-il-ga-mesh might well be merely a variant for Gish-ga-mesh, or vice versa, and this would come close to Gish-gi-mash. Now, when we have a name the pronunciation of which is not definite ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... identified with the moon. As to the true nature and functions of Janus the ancients themselves were puzzled; and where they hesitated, it is not for us confidently to decide. But the view mentioned by Varro that Janus was the god of the sky is supported not only by the etymological identity of his name with that of the sky-god Jupiter, but also by the relation in which he appears to have stood to Jupiter's two mates, Juno and Juturna. For the epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... determined by the Deity and by which alone the production of organized beings is possible." This may be the meaning; but if it is, nothing of any value can be derived from it.[A] Antoninus often uses the word "Nature" ([Greek: physis]), and we must attempt to fix its meaning, The simple etymological sense of [Greek: physis] is "production," the birth of what we call Things. The Romans used Natura, which also means "birth" originally. But neither the Greeks nor the Romans stuck to this simple meaning, nor do we. Antoninus says (x. 6): "Whether the universe is [a concourse of] ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... turn; "I mean a Democrat etymological, not a Democrat political. You stand by the Declaration of Independence, and believe in liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that all men are of one blood; and here you are, ridiculing these innocent flowers, because their brilliant beauty is not shut up in a conservatory to exhale ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... represented as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authors, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country. It is sufficient, in etymological inquiries, if the senses of kindred words be found such as may easily pass into each other, or such as may both be ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... obstinate, and his guidance is peculiarly deceptive. Men fond of such speculations, and able to support them with some show of learning, have done more to unsettle the science of grammar, and to divert ingenious teachers from the best methods of instruction, than all other visionaries put together. Etymological inquiries are important, and I do not mean to censure or discourage them, merely as such; but the folly of supposing that in our language words must needs be of the same class, or part of speech, as that ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... whaleman's self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended English words —the etymological Howards and Percys —are now democratised, nay, plebeianised —so to speak —in the New World. .. The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... phonography, or stenography rather, which is now taught in several universities. The question is agitated of introducing this study into the preparatory schools. The system is different from the English or American, being based on the etymological nature of the language. It is fast coming into use, though as yet not general. The old slow delivery seems little better than spelling to those that have mastered it. The students have usually special abbreviations of their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... (d. 1742), English philologist and lexicographer. He compiled a Dictionarium Britannicum: a more compleat universal etymological English dictionary than any extant, bearing the date 1730, but supposed to have been published in 1721. This was a great improvement on all previous attempts, and formed the basis of Dr Johnson's great work. Bailey, who was a Seventh-day Baptist (admitted 1691), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... positively mischievous. Many people, though hardly among those who are commonly reckoned good speakers, pronounce forehead as it is written. To do so is irrelevantly to call attention to the etymology of a word that has no longer precisely its etymological sense. When the thing to be denoted is familiar, we require an identifying, not a descriptive word for it; and we obey a sound instinct in disguising by a contracted pronunciation the disturbing fact ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... having three sides is its difference, and the fact of its having three angles a property. It is only when we assume the definition of a triangle as a three-sided figure that the fact of its having three angles sinks into a property. Had we chosen to define it, in accordance with its etymological meaning, as a figure with three angles, its three-sidedness would then have been a mere property, instead of being the difference; for these two attributes are so connected together that, whichever is postulated, the other ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... of this Method is the precise Observation of Facts or Phenomena and the Induction (drawing in) or accumulation of these accurate Observations as the basis of knowledge. (This is seemingly the first or etymological reason for the use of the term Induction; a term subsequently transferred, as we shall see, to the establishment of the Laws, from which then ulterior Facts are to be deduced.) When a sufficient number of Facts have been accumulated and classified in any sphere of investigation, and these ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from anti and monachus than it is from anti and monos (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... miles eastward along its banks, a walk through leafy woods brings us to Whittingham—the final syllable of which, by the way, one pronounces as "jam," as one does that of nearly all the other place-names ending in "ing-ham" in Northumberland, contrary though it be to etymological considerations—excepting, curiously enough, Chillingham, situated in the very midst of all the others. The "ing" and "ham" are in themselves a historical guide to the days in which the various villages received ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... this use of the word "unusually bold, to say the least." It is simply the etymological meaning, to call forth (Latin, provocare). ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray |
