Yet modestly he does his work survey,
And calls a finished poem an essay.
Dryden, Epistle 5, To the Earl of Roscommon.
Exemplary. A certain vagueness in our use of ‘exemplary’ makes it for us little more than a loose synonym for excellent. We plainly often forget that ‘exemplary’ is strictly that which serves, or might serve, for an exemplar to others, while only through keeping this distinctly before us will passages like the following yield their exact meaning to us.
We are not of opinion, therefore, as some are, that nature in working hath before her certain exemplary draughts or patterns.—Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, b. i. c. 3.
When the English, at the Spanish fleet’s approach in eighty-eight [1588], drew their ships out of Plymouth haven, the Lord Admiral Howard himself towed a cable, the least joint of whose exemplary hand drew more than twenty men besides.—Fuller, The Holy State, b. iv. c. 17.
Exemplify. The use of ‘exemplify’ in the sense of the Greek παραδειγματίζειν (Matt. i. 19) has now passed away. Observe also in the passage quoted the curious use of ‘traduce.’
He is a just and jealous God, not sparing to exemplify and traduce his best servants [i.e. when they sin], that their blur and penalty might scare all from venturing.—Rogers, Matrimonial Honour, p. 337.
Explode. All our present uses of ‘explode,’ whether literal or figurative, have reference to bursting, and to bursting with noise; and it is for the most part forgotten that these are all secondary and derived; that ‘to explode,’ originally an active verb, means to drive off the stage with loud clappings of the hands: and that when one of our early writers speaks of an ‘exploded’ heresy, or an ‘exploded’ opinion, his image is not drawn from something which, having burst, has so perished; but he would imply that it has been contemptuously driven off from the world’s stage—the fact that ‘explosion’ in this earlier sense was with a great noise being the connecting link between that sense and our present.
A third sort explode this opinion as trespassing on Divine Providence.—Fuller, Holy War, b. iii. c. 18.