"Etymological" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... consequences of the war as in the fruits of his 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, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... geilt is a mad person, one living in the woods, and that gealt is the genitive plural. It is interesting to find, also, from the same source, that the Irish word for the moon is gealach, indicating a probable etymological connection. ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... 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 ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... has now become a mere suburb of London, and what it resembles at the present day a delicate regard for the feelings of the inhabitants forbids me to enlarge upon. I will merely add that the recognized modern name of Margate is an etymological blunder, due to the idea immortalized in the borough motto, "Porta maris, Portus salutis," that it means Door of the Sea. The true word is still universally preserved on the lips of the local fisher-folk, who always religiously call it either ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... The etymological origin of Shakespeare's name is yet unsettled: one scholar suggests that it derives from the Anglo-Saxon, Saexberht. This would imply that the Anglo-Saxon prefix saex has by time been transmuted into Shake, and that the suffix, berht has become pear ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... commander on his prancing charger." "Llemenig," might be a proper name, for we find that one of "the three free guests of the court of Arthur," was so called. Nevertheless, as it would in that character appear somewhat out of place here, we have chosen the etymological sense ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... or NATHANIEL (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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... But, by common usage the word has been applied to all groups of people who profess a special moral doctrine, and is so employed by statisticians. The Sinhalese Buddhists have never yet had any conception of what Europeans imply in the etymological construction of the Latin root of this term. In their creed there is no such thing as a "binding" in the Christian sense—a submission to or merging of self in a Divine Being. Agama is their vernacular word to express ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... 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 ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... assertions rest merely upon historical evidence; for as to the Cialover, all that it may have retained of the Tuscan or Roman, is so much disfigured by an uncouth pronunciation and a vague orthography, that all etymological inquiries are thereby rendered intricate and unsatisfactory. And as to the Ladin, although its derivation be more manifest, yet we are equally at a loss from what period or branch of the Latin tongue to trace its real origin; for I have found, after many tedious experiments, that even the ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... Lituanian peasants on the frontier between East Prussia and Russia, not more than two hundred years ago, and should have retained its old name Parganya, which in Sanskrit meant "showering," under the form of Perkuna, which in Lituanian is a name and a name only, without any etymological meaning at all; nay, should live on, as some scholars assure us, in an abbreviated form in most Slavonic dialects, namely, in Old Slavonic as Perun, in Polish as Piorun, in Bohemian as Peraun, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... worth a war." Readers of Mr. Reitz's narrative will see that in the opinion of the Boers the sticking point was the question of suzerainty. If Mr. Chamberlain would have endorsed Sir Alfred Milner's declaration, and have said, as his High Commissioner did, that the question about suzerainty was etymological rather than political, and that he would say no more about it, following Lord Derby's policy and abstaining from using a word which was liable to be misunderstood, there would have been no war. So far as Mr. Reitz's authority goes ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... religion; and that the word was first applied to those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi superstites essent, might survive them. On the etymology no one will depend who knows the remarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients, in consequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive method which has created modern criticism. But if it be correct, it is a natural and pathetic form for superstition to take in the minds of men who saw their children fade and die; probably the greater number ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... nerves to which they are linked. In particular I might perhaps say that I have often been brought more closely to you than you probably know; for conversations with Riemer very often turn on a word, its etymological signification, formation and mutation, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... these investigations himself, but incited his students to do so, especially those in the smaller classes of the University. A good illustration is in the suggestion he made to a class that they might together work out some interesting etymological and dialectical points. "Why should not some of the intelligent ladies of this class," he asks, "go to work and arrange the facts — as I have called them — so that scholars might have before them a comprehensive ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... direct to the proper choice of words, and their judicious arrangement in a sentence, and thereby enable us to correct and avoid errors in speech, are chiefly based on principles unfolded and explained by Etymology. Etymological knowledge, then, is a prerequisite to the study of Syntax; but, in parsing, under the head of Etymology, you are required to apply the rules of Syntax. It becomes necessary, therefore, in a practical work of this sort, to treat these two parts ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... fondness for words not usually current among the cowboys, and in consequence his English was more or less reminiscent, and often phonetic rather than etymological. ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... perceived.'"[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 30 (Fr. p. 25).] Consciousness—in regard to external perception—is explained by this indeterminateness and this choice. "But there is in this necessary poverty of conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells spirit; it is, in the etymological sense of the word, discernment.'"[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 31 (Fr. p. 26).] The chief difficulty in dealing with the problems of Perception, is to explain "not how Perception arises, but how it is limited, since it should be the image of the whole and is in fact reduced ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... (1835).—Philologist and Early English scholar; has ed. Langland's Piers Plowman, The Lay of Havelock, Barbour's Bruce, and other early English texts, a complete ed. of Chaucer, 6 vols. (1894), and of many of his works separately, and is author of An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Principles of English Etymology, and books on the place-names of the counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... (Viscount Newhaven) married the Dowager Duchess of Radnor, who was at that time living in Radnor House. After the death of the first Earl, the family name is recorded as Roberts in the registers, an instance of the etymological carelessness of the time. In Radnor House was one of the pillared arcades fashionable in the Jacobean period, of which a specimen is still to be seen over the doorway of the dining-room in the Queen's House. On the first floor was a remarkably fine fireplace, which has ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... name is Semitic is no longer seriously questioned by any scholar. The underlying stem suggests etymological relationship with the god Ashur. If this be so, Ishtar may mean 'the goddess that brings blessing' to mankind, but all this is tentative, as are ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... writer of the 17th century, 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
... be noted, however, that this is not a strict and proper use of the term, since its natural etymological meaning is to denote him who has one particular evil, viz. the wasting his substance: he is unsaved (as the term literally denotes) who is wasting away by his own fault; and this he really may be said to be; the destruction of his substance ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... 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 found ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... words or rhythm as dithyrambic, like the dithyrambus, that is, the wild choral-singing of the worshippers of Dionysus. But Dithyrambus seems to have been, in the first instance, the name, not of the hymn, but of the god to whom the hymn is sung; and, through a tangle of curious etymological speculations as to the precise derivation of this name, one thing seems clearly visible, that it commemorates, namely, the double birth of the vine-god; that [26] he is born once and again; his birth, first of fire, and afterwards of dew; the two dangers that beset him; his victory over two enemies, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... rolls and registers, the explanations given being usually supported by medieval instances. But it cannot be used uncritically, for the author does not appear to have been either a linguist or a philologist, and, although he usually refrains from etymological conjecture, he occasionally ventures with disastrous results. Thus, to take a few instances, he identifies Prust with Priest, but the medieval le prust is quite obviously the Norman form of Old Fr. le Proust, the provost. He attempts to connect pullen ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... into vain and futile reasonings, derived from the scattered passages of some early writers, from the ambiguous silence of others—and, above all, from the dreams of etymological analogy or mythological fable, I believe the earliest civilizers of Greece to have been foreign settlers; deducing my belief from the observations of common sense rather than from obscure and unsatisfactory research. I ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... these cases it seems likely that he believed in an etymological relation between the two words, and so fancied that he was drawing attention to an original unity of meaning. Some such hypothesis is needful to mitigate the atrocity of his worst pun, in Paradise ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... debatable, when it is not wholly neglected. The events which are not scored are reported either as personal and conventional opinions, or they are not news. They do not take shape until somebody protests, or somebody investigates, or somebody publicly, in the etymological meaning of the word, makes ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... he entered on this discussion. His words are, "The preacher, in contending with the Universalist and the Restorationist, would commit an error, and it may be, suffer a failure in his argument, should he lay the whole stress of it on the etymological or historical significance of the words, ai[o]n, ai[o]nios, and attempt to prove that of themselves they necessarily carry the meaning of endless duration." Lange's Eccl. p. 48. Beecher's "Retribution," p. 154. Prof. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... 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 referred to one ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... a head, not only from the side itself being the coin or head, but from 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, p. 157. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... 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
... (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 for it. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... and as in general the Ravennas teems with errors and the Notitia is fairly correct, the spelling Vindolana has always been preferred, although (as Prof. Sir John Rhys tells me) its second part -lana is an etymological puzzle. It now appears that in this, as in some few other cases, the Ravennas has kept the true tradition. The termination -landa is a Celtic word denoting a small defined space, akin to the Welsh 'llan', and also ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... back through "flip" and the old Northumbrian present participle ending "an" to the Icelandic "fleipa," which means to prattle—I found this out in a dictionary and copied it down for Lalage. Miss Pettigrew was not, I think, justified in applying the word, supposing that she used it in its strict etymological sense, to Lalage's composition. There was more in the essay than mere prattle. But Miss Pettigrew may have had reasons of her own, reasons which I can only guess, for wishing to depreciate this particular essay. It is quite possible that she was herself ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... On the lowest grounds on which our Lord and His Apostles can be placed they must, at least, be regarded as honest men. Now, though honest speech does not require that words should be used always and only in their etymological sense, it does require that they should not be used so as to affirm what the speaker knows to be false. Whilst, therefore, our Lord and His Apostles might use the word [Greek: daimonizesthai], or the phrase, [Greek: daimonion ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Under this first etymological notion of Pamphlets may be comprehended the vulgar stories of the Nine Worthies of the World, of the Seven Champions of Christendom, Tom Thumb, Valentine and Orson, &c., as also most of apocryphal lucubrations. The greatest collection of this first sort ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and as briefly as possible stated the functions of each. As they all belong to the same family they are related to one another but some are in closer affinity than others. To point out the exact relationship and the dependency of one word on another is called parsing and in order that every etymological connection may be distinctly understood a brief resume of the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... bearing 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 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... term "uterus" came into use "vulva" was confined (as its sense of folding doors suggests that it should be) to the external entrance. The classic term cunnus for the external genitals was chiefly used by the poets; it has been the etymological source of various European names for this region, such as the old French con, which has now, however, disappeared from literature while even in popular usage it has given place to lapin and similar terms. But ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... this spectral appearance believed in in Scotland, where the apparition is called Wraith, which word is defined in Jameson's Etymological Dictionary, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... without pursuing, through countless ages, the history of the past. In tracing the physical delineation of the globe, we behold the present and the past reciprocally incorporated, as it were, with one another; for the domain of nature is like that of languages, in which etymological research reveals a successive development, by showing us the primary condition of an idiom reflected in the forms of speech in use at the present day. The study of the material world renders this reflection of the past ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Etymologically, scatt certainly seems to have some connection with , but practically it has none whatever, so far as the receiver is concerned, and is as to him simply a feu-duty. The opinion of the country, however, is so far in favour of the etymological view, that it is generally conceived that all towns ( townships) paying scatt have right to a share of the commons, while those who do not have none; but this point has never been settled by ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... 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 to which they may be traced in an other, deserves ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown |
