PROFESSOR OF FRENCH AND HEAD OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, NOTTINGHAM; SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF NAMES," "SURNAMES"
"Vous savez le latin, sans doute?"—
"Oui, mais faites comme si je ne le savais pas."
(Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, ii. 6.)
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
| First Edition | March 1912 |
| Reprinted | June 1912 |
| Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged | November 1913 |
| Third Edition | May 1917 |
| Fourth Edition | January 1922 |
| Reprinted | February 1925 |
| Reprinted | January 1927 |
PREFACE
A long and somewhat varied experience in language teaching has convinced me that there are still, in spite of the march of science, many people who are capable of getting intellectual pleasure from word-history. I hope that to such people this little book, the amusement of occasional leisure, will not be unwelcome. It differs, I believe, from any other popular book on language in that it deals essentially with the origins of words, and makes no attempt to enforce a moral. My aim has been to select especially the unexpected in etymology, "things not generally known," such as the fact that Tammany was an Indian chief, that assegai occurs in Chaucer, that jilt is identical with Juliet, that brazil wood is not named from Brazil, that to curry favour means to comb down a horse of a particular colour, and so forth. The treatment is made as simple as possible, a bowing acquaintance with Latin and French being all that is assumed, though words from many other languages are necessarily included. In the case of each word I have traced the history just so far back as it is likely to be of interest to the reader who is not a philological specialist.
I have endeavoured to state each proposition in its simplest terms, without enumerating all the reservations and indirect factors which belong to the history of almost every word.