The triumphant nobles of William the Conquerer, like the "fig- showers" of ancient Greece, are buried beneath the dust of time but stories of both are caught in the words silly and sycophant.Īn insight into man's growth a fresh color and vividness of language a quickened understanding of our words themselves: these are some of the byproducts of a look into word origins. Every man has his tongue in it the fool as surely as the sage, the peasant and the thief as richly as the robber-baron and the millionaire. The basic democratic process is the shaping of speech.
Of this great gathering of words, I have set down those that have origins at once interesting and enlightening.
Many are members of large families, with intertwining legend and history others, like Topsy, "just growed." Slow change, swift new coinage of science or slang, ancient or recent borrowing from many tongues: together they give flexibility, power, and beauty to English, the richest and most widespread language of all time. Some of the words in our language can be traced to a remote past some have histories that begin but yesterday. The three restless minglers, the soldier, the trader, The rest were gleaned from here, there, and the farthest corners Along the shores of the Mediterranean, they lingered in Greece, they built on the seven hills of Rome, and through the Romance language rejoined the Teuton strains to form our Twenty-five percent of our words migrated along the rivers fifty English. On other journeys they took the water route of the great midland sea.
By one path they wandered up rivers, breasting the Danube into the heart of Europe, roaming westward with the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxon speech. Somewhere in the Near East tliey seem to have started, in that Garden of Eden of earliest man. Not two percent of our English words first rose in the British Isles. The American speech, like the American people, comes from all over the world. Word history traces the path of human fellowship, the bridges from mind to mind, from nation to nation.Īnd our language is truly international. To know the origin of words is to know how men think, how they have fashioned their civilization.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Copyright 1945 by Philosophical Library, Inc.
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