[72] [It is rather from the old Dutch trecker, a ‘puller’. Very few English words come to us from German.]
[73] [So Skeat, Etym. Dict. But the Germans themselves take their schwindler (in the sense of cheat) to have been adopted from the English ‘swindler’. Dr. Dunger asserts that it was introduced into their language by Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth’s engravings, 1794-99 (Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache, 1899, p. 7).]
[74] Pisgah Sight of Palestine, 1650, p. 217.
[75] [This word introduced as a ‘pure neologism’ by D’Israeli (Curiosities of Literature, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384) as a companion to ‘mother-tongue’, had been already used by Sir W. Temple in 1672 (Hall, Mod. English, p. 44). Nay, even by Tyndale, see T. L. K. Oliphant, The New English, i, 439.]
[76] [‘Folk-lore’ was introduced by Mr. W. J. Thoms, editor of Notes and Queries, in 1846. Still later came ‘Folk-etymology’, the earliest use of which in N.E.D. is given as 1883, but the editor’s work bearing that title appeared in 1882.]
[77] Holy State, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior, freedom in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of old. But in this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at the period of its highest culture with a timidity, which caused it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of Catullus: Ubi cerva silvicultrix, ubi aper nemorivagus? or again, as his ‘fluentisonus’? Virgil’s vitisator (Æn. 7, 179) is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay, the language did not even retain those compound epithets which it once had formed, but was content to let numbers of them drop: ‘parcipromus’; ‘turpilucricupidus’, and many more, do not extend beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (i. 5, 70): Res tota magis Græcos decet, nobis minus succedit; nec id fieri naturâ puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque cum κυρταύχενα mirati sumus, incurvicervicum vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere he complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of the little generative power which existed in the Latin language, that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains (viii. 6, 32): Deinde, tanquum consummata sint omnia, nihil generare audemus ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that the silver age of the language, which sought to recover, and did recover to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier times, reasserted among other powers that of combining words with a certain measure of success.
[78] [For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott’s Shakespearian Grammar, pp. 317-20.]
[79] [Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: “The word it must be acknowledged is a new one”.]
[80] Collection of Scarce Tracts, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii, p. 91.
[81] [Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule, Πῦς-μαντια, 1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, Mod. English, p. 131.]