Pursuer. ‘Pursue’ and ‘pursuer’ are older words in the language than ‘persecute’ and ‘persecutor’—earlier adoptions of ‘persequor’ and ‘persecutor,’ through Old French and not immediately from the Latin. Besides the meaning which they still retain, they once also covered the meanings which these later words have, since their introduction, appropriated as exclusively their own. In Scotch law the prosecutor is the ‘pursuer,’ ὁ διώκων.
That first was a blaspheme and pursuere.—1 Tim. i. 13. Wiclif.
If God leave them in this hardness of heart, they may prove as desperate opposites and pursuers of all grace, of Christ and Christians, as the most horrible open swine, as we see in Saul and Julian.—Rogers, Naaman the Syrian, p. 106.
| Quaint, | } |
| Quaintly. |
In ‘quaint,’ which is the Middle English ‘quaynt,’ ‘queynt,’ ‘coint,’ Old French ‘cointe,’ the same word as the Latin ‘cognitum,’ there lies always now the notion of a certain curiosity and oddness, however these may be subordinated to ends of beauty and grace, and indeed may themselves be made to contribute to these ends: pretty after some bygone standard of prettiness; but all this is of late introduction into the word, which had once simply the meaning of neat, graceful, skilful, subtle, knowing.
O britel joye, O sweete venym queynte,
O monstre that so subtily canst peynte
Thyn giftes, under hiew of stedfastnesse,
That thou desceyuest bothe more and lesse.
Chaucer, The Marchaundes Tale (Morris, ii. p. 343).