Century, but they have now dropped out of use; what our penny-a-liners now call inebriety might in 1380 be Englished not only by Chaucer's dronkenesse, but by Wickliffe's drunkenhede, by Mire's dronkelec, and by Gower's drunkeshepe.[1] Our lately-coined pigheadedness and longwindedness show that there is life in the good old ness yet. Such new substantives as Bumbledom and rascaldom prove that dom is not yet dead; and such new adjectives as peckish and rubbishy show a lingering love for the Old English adjectival endings.
More than one Englishman might when a child have given ear to the first Franciscan sermons ever heard in Lincolnshire, and might at fourscore and upwards have listened to the earliest part of the Handlyng Synne. Such a man (a true Nævius), on contrasting the number of Romance terms common in 1300 with the hundreds of good old Teutonic words of his childhood, words that the rising generation understood not, might well mourn that in his old age England's tongue had become strange to Englishmen.[2] But about this time, 1300, the Genius of our language, as it seems, awoke from sleep, clutched his remaining hoards with tighter grip, and thought that we had lost too many old words already. Their rate of disappearance between 1220 and 1290 had been
- ↑ Other roots, with all these four endings, may be found in Stratmann's Dictionary.
- ↑ As to the speech of religion, compare the Creed at page 138, with the description of Charity at page 198; yet there are but sixty years between them. In later times, Caxton says that he found an amazing difference between the words of his childhood and those of his old age: Hobbes and Cibber must have remarked the same, as to turns of expression.
