LONDON, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1854.
Notes.
ELIMINATE.
(Vol. v., p. 317.)
"N. & Q." has from time to time done much good service by holding up to reprobation modern and growing corruptions of the English language. I trust that its columns may be open to one more attempt to rescue from abuse the word which stands at the head of this article.
Its signification, whether sought from Latin usage and etymology, or from the works of English mathematicians, is "to turn out of doors," "to oust," or, as we say in the midland counties, "to get shut of." In French it may be rendered as well by se défaire as by éliminer. Within the last seven or eight years, however, this valuable spoil of dead Latinity has been strangely perverted, and, through the ignorance or carelessness of writers, it has bidden fair to take to itself two significations utterly distinct from its derivation, viz. to "elicit," and to "evaluate." The former signification, if less vicious, is more commonly used than the latter. I append examples of both from three of the most elegant writers of the day. In the third extract the word under consideration is used in the latter sense; in the other extracts it carries the former.
Lectures on the Philosophical Tendencies of the Age, by J. D. Morrell, London, 1848, p. 41.:
"Had the men of ancient times, when they peopled the universe with deities, a deeper perception of the religious element in the mind, than had Newton, when having eliminated the great law of the natural creation, his enraptured soul burst forth into the infinite and adored?"