I can hardly believe my eyes while I read such a petit novelist charging the whole Church as fools and heretics for not subscribing to a silly heretical notion, solely of his own invention.—South, Animadversions on Dr. Sherlock’s Book, p. 3.
Nursery. We have but one use of ‘nursery’ at this present, namely as the place of nursing; but it was once applied as well to the person nursed, or the act of nursing.
A jolly dame, no doubt; as appears by the well battling of the plump boy, her nursery.—Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, part i. b. ii. c. 8.
If nursery exceeds her Matrimonial Honour, p. 247.
I loved her most, and thought to set my rest
On her kind nursery.
Shakespeare, King Lear, act i. sc. 1.
Obelisk. The ‘obelus’ is properly a sharp-pointed spear or spit. With a sign resembling this, spurious or doubtful passages were marked in the books of antiquity, which sign bore therefore this name of ‘obelus,’ or sometimes of its diminutive ‘obeliscus.’ It is in this sense that we find ‘obelisk’ employed by the writers in the seventeenth century; while for us at the present a small pillar tapering towards the summit is the only ‘obelisk’ that we know.
The Lord Keeper, the most circumspect of any man alive to provide for uniformity, and to countenance it, was scratched with their obelisk, that he favoured Puritans, and that sundry of them had protection through his connivency or clemency.—Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, part i. p. 95.
I have set my mark upon them [i.e. affected pedantic words]; and if any of them may have chanced to escape the obelisk, there can arise no other inconvenience from it but an occasion to exercise the choice and judgment of the reader.—Phillips, New World of Words, Preface.