A Select Glossary: Of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from Their Present (Paperback) | Released: 04 Nov 2014

From the PREFACE.

THIS volume is intended to be a contribution, I am aware a very slight one, to a special branch of the study of our own language. It proposes to trace in a popular manner and for general readers the changes of meaning which so many of its words have undergone; words which, as current with us as they were with our forefathers, yet mean something different on our lips from what they meant upon theirs. Of my success in carrying out the scheme which I had set before myself, it does not become me to speak, except to say that I have fallen a good deal below my hopes, and infinitely below my desires. But of the scheme itself I have no doubts. I feel sure that, if only adequately carried out, few works of the same compass could embrace matter of more manifold instruction, or in a region of knowledge which it would be more desirable to occupy. In the present condition of education in England, above all with the pressure a upon young men, which is ever increasing, to complete their educational course at the earliest possible date, the number of those enjoying the inestimable advantages, mental and moral, which more than any other languages the Latin and the Greek supply, must ever be growing smaller. It becomes therefore a duty to seek elsewhere the best substitutes within reach for that discipline of the faculties which these languages would better than any other have afforded. And I believe, when these two are set aside, our own language and literature will furnish the best substitutes; which, even though they may not satisfy perfectly, are not therefore to be rejected. I am persuaded that the decomposition, word by word, of small portions of our best poetry and prose —Lycidas suggests itself to me as in verse offering more exactly what I seek than any other poem, perhaps some of Bacons Essays in prose,—the compensations which we look for are most capable of being found; even as I have little doubt that in many of our higher English schools compensations of the kind are already oftentimes obtained.

In such a decomposition, to be followed by a reconstruction, of some small portions of a great English Classic, matters almost innumerable, and pressing on the attention from every side, would claim to be noticed; but certainly not last nor least the changes which, on close examination, would be seen to have overcome many of the words employed. It is to point out some of these changes; to suggest how many more there may be, there certainly are, which have not been noticed in these pages; to show how slight and subtle, while yet most real, how easily therefore evading detection, unless constant vigilance is used, these changes often have been; to trace here and there the progressive steps by which the old meaning has been put off, and the new put on, the exact road which a word has travelled; this has been my purpose here; and I have desired by such means to render some small assistance to those who are disposed to regard this as a serviceable discipline in the training of their own minds or the minds of others.

The book is, as its name declares, a Select Glossary. There would have been no difficulty whatever in doubling or trebling the number of articles admitted into it. But my purpose being rather to arouse curiosity than fully to gratify it, to lead others themselves to take note of changes, and to account for them, rather than to take altogether this pleasant labour out of their hands and to do for them what they could more profitably do for themselves, I have consciously left much of the work undone, even as unconsciously no doubt I have left a great deal more. At the same time it has not been mere caprice which has induced the particular selection of words which has been actually made. Various motives, but in almost every case such as I could give account of to myself, have ruled this selection….