"Nunc, spectatores, Iovis summi causa clare plaudite."
(Plautus, Amphitruo.)
Debenture is for debentur, there are owing. Dominie is the Latin vocative domine, formerly used by schoolboys in addressing their master, while pandy, a stroke on the hand with a cane, is from pande palmam, hold out your hand. Parse is the Lat. pars, occurring in the question Quæ pars orationis? What part of speech? Omnibus, for all, is a dative plural. Limbo is the ablative of Lat. limbus, an edge, hem, in the phrase "in limbo patrum," where limbus is used for the abode of the Old Testament saints on the verge of Hades. It is already jocular in Shakespeare—
"I have some of 'em in limbo patrum, and there they are like to dance these three days."
(Henry VIII., v. 3.)
Folio, quarto, etc., are ablatives, from the phrases in folio, in quarto, etc., still used in French. Premises, earlier premisses, is a slightly disguised Lat. præmissas, the aforesaid, lit. sent before, used in deeds to avoid repeating the full description of a property. It is thus the same word as logical premisses, or assumptions. Quorum is from a legal formula giving a list of persons "of whom" a certain number must be present. A teetotum is so called because it has, or once had, on one of its sides, a T standing for totum, all. It was also called simply a totum. The other three sides also bore letters to indicate what share, if any, of the stake they represented. Cotgrave has totum (toton), "a kind of game with a whirle-bone." In spite of the interesting anecdote about the temperance orator with an impediment in his speech, it was probably teetotum that suggested teetotaller.
We have also a few words straight from Greek, e.g., analysis, aroma, atlas, the world-sustaining demi-god whose picture used to decorate map-books, colon, comma, dogma, epitome, miasma, nausea, Gk. ναυσία, lit. sea-sickness, nectar, whence the fruit called a nectarine—
"Nectarine fruits which the compliant boughs
Yielded them, sidelong as they sat recline."
(Paradise Lost, iv. 332.)