A. W. [Anthony Wood] was with him several times, ate and drank with him, and had several discourses with him concerning arms and armory, which he understood well; but he found him nice and supercilious.—A. Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 1848, vol. i. p. 161.
Niece. This word has undergone the same change and limitation of meaning as ‘nephew,’ with indeed the further limitation that it is now applied to the female sex alone, to the daughter of a brother or a sister, being once used, as ‘neptis’ was at the first, for children’s children, male and female alike. See ‘Nephew.’
Laban answeride to hym: My dowytres and sones, and the flockis, and alle that thou beholdist, ben myne, and what may I do to my sones and to my neces?—Gen. xxi. 43 (cf. Exod. xxxiv. 7). Wiclif.
The Emperor Augustus, among other singularities that he had by himself during his life, saw, ere he died, the nephew of his niece, that is to say, his progeny to the fourth degree of lineal descent.—Holland, Pliny, vol. i. p. 162.
Within the compass of which very same time he [Julius Cæsar] lost by death first his mother, then his daughter Julia, and not long after his niece by the said daughter.—Id., Suetonius, p. 11.
| Noisome, | } |
| Noisomeness. |
At present offensive and moving disgust; but once noxious and actually hurtful; thus a skunk would be ‘noisome’ now; a tiger was ‘noisome’ then. In all passages of the Authorized Translation of the Bible where the word occurs, as at Ezek. xiv. 15, 21, it is used not in the present meaning, but the past. See ‘Annoy.’
They that will be rich fall into temptations and snares, and into many foolish and noisome [βλαβεράς] lusts, which drown men in perdition and destruction.—1 Tim. vi. 9. Geneva.
He [the superstitious person] is persuaded that they be gods indeed, but such as be noisome, hurtful, and doing mischief unto men.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 260.
This noisome creature [the crocodile] is one of the greatest wonders we meet with, in that from so small a beginning as an egg, not much bigger than that of a turkey, they increase to eight or ten yards in length.—Herbert, Travels, 1636, p. 323.