Book/Studies in Words

Front Cover

Opening Lines

This book has grown out of a practice which was at first my necessity and later my hobby; whether at last it has attained the dignity of a study, others must decide. In my young days when I had to take my pupils through Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts neither they nor I could long be content to translate a word in the sense which its particular context demanded while leaving the different senses it bore in other places to be memorised, without explanation, as if they were wholly different words. Natural curiosity and mnemonic thrift drove us, as it drives others, to link them up and to see, where possible, how they could have radiated out from a central meaning. Once embarked, it was impossible not to be curious about the later senses of those which survived into Modern English. Margins and notebooks thus became steadily fuller.

Contents

Preface

1 Introduction

2 Nature (with Phusis, Kind, Physical etc.)

3 Sad (with Gravis)

4 Wit (with Ingenium)

5 Free (with Eleutherios, Liberal, Frank etc.)

6 Sense (with Sentence, Sensibility, and Sensible)

7 Simple

8 Conscience and Conscious

9 World

10 Life

11 I Dare Say

12 At the Fringe of Language Notes

Cross-References

Verbicide