FOOTNOTES
[1] Cf. De Wulf: L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté, p. 40.
[2] Sandys: History of Classical Scholarship, I, 438.
[3] Sandys, III, 54.
[4] This “mosaic of etymology” which I offer is not, I think, simply an ingenious tour de force. It has a significance and a practical value. It may illustrate the composite nature of the English language; it may amuse a curious reader; it may enliven a Greek class with the touch of actuality; it may disclose dim vistas into the distant past through the medium of everyday language, exemplifying history through common things. All the words of this phantasy are of Greek origin, except the article, the pronouns, the prepositions and conjunctions, and a few other small words: “so, as, then, home, let, go, do, all” and parts of the verb “to be.” Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary (Student’s edition) is the authority. The exclusively technical words of modern sciences which are almost wholly Greek have not, for the most part, been mentioned. It is needless to remark that the prescriptions of the phantom’s pharmacy are not authoritative.
This jeu d’esprit has attracted so much attention as to be reprinted by the American Classical Association and to be noticed by several metropolitan editors. That attention is the motive for giving the article permanent position in a book with which a novel plea for Greek has a certain, though remote, connection.
[5] For analysis of thought, see Model English, bk. II, chap. X, by F. P. Donnelly, S. J. Allyn and Bacon: Boston, New York and Chicago.