I am depraved unjustly; who never deprived the Church of her authority.—Fuller, Appeal of Injured Innocence, pt. i. p. 45.
Unjustly thou depravest it with the name
Of servitude, to serve whom God ordains,
Or nature.
Milton, Paradise Lost, vi. 174.
Derive. Tropical uses of the verb ‘to derive’ have quite superseded the literal, so that we now ‘derive’ anything rather than waters from a river.
An infinite deal of labour there is to lade out the water that riseth upon the workmen, for fear it choke up the pits; for to prevent which inconvenience they derive it by other drains.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals.
Nor may the industry of the citizens of Salisbury be forgotten, who have derived the river into every street therein, so that Salisbury is a heap of islets thrown together.—Fuller, Worthies of England: Wiltshire.
Descry. This verb had a technical meaning in the seventeenth century, which it afterwards lost; its loss leading to the introduction of the French verb ‘to reconnoitre,’ ridiculed as an outlandish term by Addison (1711), and more than half a century later not admitted by Johnson into his Dictionary. It was exactly this which ‘to descry,’ as used by Shakespeare and by Milton, meant. [The verb is the equivalent of the Old French descrire, descrivre, Latin describere, to describe.]
Who hath descried the number of the foe?