We cannot follow a better pattern for elocution than God Himself. Therefore He using divers words in his Holy Writ, and indifferently for one thing in nature, we may use the same liberty in our English versions out of Hebrew or Greek, for that copy or store that He hath given us.—The Translators [of the Bible, 1611] to the Reader.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war.
Shakespeare, Henry V. act iii. sc. 1.
Drayton’s Heroical Epistles are well worth the reading also, for the purpose of our subject, which is to furnish an English historian with choice and copy of tongue.—Bolton, Hypercritica, p. 235.
The sun, the prince of all the bodies of light, is the principal, the rule and the copy, which they in their proportions imitate and transcribe.—Bishop Taylor, Exhortation to the Imitation of Christ.
Coquet. At present all our ‘coquets’ are female. But, as in the case with so many other words instanced in this volume, what once belonged to both sexes is now restricted to one.
Cocquet; a beau, a gallant, a general lover; also a wanton girl that speaks fair to several lovers at once.—Phillips, New World of Words.
Corpse. Now only used for the body abandoned by the spirit of life, but once for the body of the living equally as of the dead; now only = ‘cadaver,’ but once ‘corpus’ as well. It will follow that ‘dead corpses’ (2 Kings xix. 35 and often) is not a tautology.
A valiant corpse, where force and beauty met.