Some threepence in the whole.
Ben Jonson, Volpone, act ii. sc. 2.
Gelding. Restrained at present to horses which have ceased to be entire; but until ‘eunuch,’ which is of somewhat late adoption, had been introduced into the language, serving also the needs which that serves now.
Thanne Joseph was lad in Egepte, and bought him Potiphar, the gelding of Pharao.—Gen. xxxix. 1. Wiclif.
And whanne thei weren come up of the watir, the spirit of the Lord ravyschide Filip, and the gelding say hym no more.—Acts viii. 39. Wiclif.
Lysimachus was very angry, and thought great scorn that Demetrius should reckon him a gelding.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 741.
Generosity. We still use ‘generous’ occasionally in the sense of highly or nobly born; but ‘generosity’ has quite lost this its earlier sense, and acquired a purely ethical meaning. Its history illustrates, as does the history of so many other words, what one may call the aristocratic tendencies of language.
Nobility began in thine ancestors and ended in thee: and the generosity that they gained by virtue, thou hast blotted by vice.—Lyly, Euphues and his England.
Their eyes are commonly black and small, noses little, nails almost as long as their fingers, but serving to distinguish their generosity.—Harris, Voyages, vol. i. p. 465.
Genial. It is curious to find ‘genial’ used in a sense not merely so different, but so directly opposed to that in which we employ it now, as in the quotation which follows we do. Whether there are other examples of the same use, I am unable to say.