Without its help I could not have drawn up the lists of the new terms that cropped up between 1300 and 1500.[1]
I must apologize to those of my readers, who are unlearned, for the Latin in my text; the truth is, that there are so many shades of meaning in our words, that I cannot thoroughly explain myself without falling back upon the foreign tongue. When specifying English words, I have almost wholly confined myself to terms in use in 1873; of these, about fifteen hundred, I think, occur in my pages. In a work like this, ranging over the monuments of twelve hundred years, mistakes will be made; I have no doubt that I have sometimes assigned to a new word a date later than its real first appearance in England.
It is but fair to warn those who love to call a spade ‘an horticultural implement,’ that they will not relish my Sixth Chapter.[2]
- ↑ One of the charms of Philology is, that new facts bearing upon it are always forthcoming, if a man will but keep his eyes and ears open. I for one have picked up much from gamekeepers and sextons in many a shire. In the Orton-Tichborne trial (the one for perjury), a Hampshire witness called the stump of a tree ‘the more.’ This word may be seen in the Dorsetshire poem of 1240, which is quoted in my work. The more occurs in the trial as reported by the Daily Papers of September 4, 1873.
- ↑ Like a trusty sentinel, I sound an alarm against the enemy's approach down to the very last moment. September, 1873, has been remarkable for the opening of the new Town Hall at Bradford, for the English Pilgrimage to St. Marie Alacoque, and for the abandonment of France by the Germans. Our penny-a-liners called the Town Hall a grandiose building; asked what was the rationale of pilgrimages; and described the men of freed Verdun as ingurgitating spirituous stimulus. What will a penny paper of 1973 be like?
