J. A. H.
Enough is from the same root as the German genug, where the first g has been lost, and the latter softened and almost lost in its old English pronunciation, enow. The modern pronunciation is founded, as that of many other words is, upon an affected style of speech, ridiculed by Holofernes.[[4]] The word bread, for example, is almost universally called bred; but in Chaucer's poetry and indeed now in Yorkshire, it is pronounced bré-äd, a dissyllable.
T. J. Buckton.
Birmingham.
Footnote 4:[(return)]
The Euphuists are probably chargeable with this corruption.
In Vol. vii., p. 455. there is an inquiry respecting the change in the pronunciation of the word enough, and quotations are given from Waller, where the word is used, rhyming with bow and plough. But though spelt enough, is not the word, in both places, really enow? and is there not, in fact, a distinction between the two words? Does not enough always refer to quantity, and enow to number: the former, to what may be measured; the latter, to that which may be counted? In both quotations the word enough refers to numbers?
S. S. S.
Feelings of Age (Vol. vii., p. 429.).—A.C. asks if it "is not the general feeling, that man in advancing years would not like to begin life again?" I fear not. It is a wisdom above the average of what men possess that made the good Sir Thomas Browne say:
"Though I think no man can live well once, but he that could live twice, yet for my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my dayes: not upon Cicero's ground—because I have lived them well—but for fear I should live them worse. I find my growing judgment daily instruct me how to be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity make me daily do worse. I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then, because I was a child, and, because I commit them still, I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of Æson's bath before threescore."