These Pitch-marks offmark sundry things by their sundry suchnesses, as ‘The taller or less tall man of the two is my friend,’ or ‘The tallest man is less tall than the tree,’ or ‘The least tall man is taller than the girl.’
The three Pitches may be called the Common Pitch, the Higher Pitch, and the Highest Pitch.
The Welsh has a fourth Pitch-word, called the Even Pitch, as pell, far; pellach, farther; pellaf, farthest; pelled, as far (as something else).
Younger may mean younger reckoned from young, or younger reckoned from old; as ‘Alfred at 80 is younger than Edward at 85.’ In this case we may well say less old.
Worse (wyrse) is shapen from wo, wa, we, a stub-root which means wrong, atwist, bad in any way, and is our woe.
The r in weor is most likely of a forstrengthening and not a comparative meaning—weor, wyr, very bad; weorer, wyrer, still more strongly bad. But, not to double the r, men might have put a strengthening s, and so had weors.
TIME-TAKING.
You cannot behold a thing in your mind otherwise than in or under some doing or in some form of being.
Every case of being or doing is a taking of time, as ‘the lily is white,’ ‘the man strikes,’ ‘the bird flies or was hit.’ For though the being white, or the striking or flying or hitting was only for the twinkling of an eye, it took time; for the eyelid takes time, however short it may be, to flit down and up over the eyeball. Thence the word commonly called the verb may be called the Time-taking word or Time-word, as it is called by the Germans Das Zeitwort; or, as it is the main word of the thought and speech, it is the Thought-word or Speech-word; or, as it is called in Latin and other tongues, the Word.