the history of this one word. In court, the secondary significations have almost effaced the primitive, and, to be clear, we say rather the court-yard than the court of a castle; but a nobleman of the court, a case in court, the court instructs the jury, to pay court; and the derivative words courtly, courteous, a courtesy, courtship, courtier, courtesan, all coming from one of the specific applications of court, tell us of the manners of those who walk in kings' houses.
Not seldom, the proper meaning of a word is altogether lost, and it diverges into others so unlike that the common apprehension is unable to connect them by any tie. Become contains come, but not to be, although we may often render it by 'come to be' Its be is the same with that of befall, beset, bemoan, a prefix giving a transitive meaning to an intransitive verb: to become is originally 'to come upon, to come by, to obtain, to get'. The transfer of meaning, from 'obtain' to 'come to be', is a somewhat peculiar one; but that it is natural enough is shown by the fact that we have gone on to treat in the same way the, equivalent verb to get, saying he gets tired for he becomes tired, and so on. From the same primitive sense of 'come upon', we have taken a step in another direction to 'sit well upon, be adapted to, suit', as when we say "such conduct does not become one in high station". To trace the relation between these two meanings of become is out of the power of most of those who use them; even the dictionaries enter them as two separate words. Not much less difficult is the connection of kind, 'well-disposed, friendly', with kind, 'a sort of species'; or of like, 'to be fond of', with like, 'resembling'—although both are but a working out, in the minds of the language-makers, of the thought "a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind": the idea of kindred or resemblance leading naturally to that of consideration and affection. So, once more, how second, 'the sixtieth of a minute', and second as ordinal of two, come to be the same word, would be a puzzle for most English speakers: the fact that seconds constitute the second order in the sexagesimal subdivision of the hour and of the degree being by no means a conspicuous one; and the act which stamped this particular second order of division with the name
