"Etymological" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... demons; and finally the occurrence of cases of Berserker madness and cannibalism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucinations, being interpreted as due to such demoniacal metamorphosis, gave rise to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The etymological proceedings, to which Mr. Cox would incontinently ascribe the origin of the entire superstition, seemed to me to have played a very subordinate part in the matter. To suppose that Jean Grenier imagined himself to be a wolf, because the Greek word for wolf sounded like the word for light, and ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... having three sides is its difference, and the fact of its having three angles a property. It is only when we assume the definition of a triangle as a three-sided figure that the fact of its having three angles sinks into a property. Had we chosen to define it, in accordance with its etymological meaning, as a figure with three angles, its three-sidedness would then have been a mere property, instead of being the difference; for these two attributes are so connected together that, whichever is postulated, the other will ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... them with some show of learning, have done more to unsettle the science of grammar, and to divert ingenious teachers from the best methods of instruction, than all other visionaries put together. Etymological inquiries are important, and I do not mean to censure or discourage them, merely as such; but the folly of supposing that in our language words must needs be of the same class, or part of speech, as that to which ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... time to caution him against supposing that, because he knows the roots of a word, he necessarily knows the meaning of the word itself. Exercises are interspersed throughout this Part which can be worked out with, or without, an English Etymological Dictionary,[44] as the nature of the case may require. The exercises have not been selected at random; many of them have been subjected to the practical test of experience, and have been used ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... the Gergasha of the Hebrews. Reland gives a variety of derivations, quoted from Pliny, Jamblichus, Epiphanius, and Origen; all of which are much more satisfactory as they regard the position of a certain town in the Land of Gilead, than as they convey any precise ideas as to its etymological import. After the Romans conquered Judea, the country beyond the Jordan became one of their favourite colonies; to which, from the circumstance of its containing ten cities, they gave the name of Decapolis, an appellation recognised by St. Mark in the seventh chapter of his Gospel. ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... in the consequences of the war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal" does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of parliament and of peers who are ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... became the business of philosophers and of antiquarian writers deliberately to "whitewash" the gods of popular religion. Systematic explanations of the sacred stories, whether as preserved in poetry or as told by priests, had to be provided. India had her etymological and her legendary school of mythology.(1) Thus, while the hymn SEEMED to tell how the Maruts were gods, "born together with the spotted deer," the etymological interpreters explained that the word for deer only meant the many-coloured ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... represent wife by a woman holding a broom—certainly not to brandish it offensively or defensively against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft, but for the more harmless uses for which the besom was first invented—the idea involved being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the English wife (weaver) and daughter (duhitar, milkmaid). Without confining the sphere of woman's activity to Kueche, Kirche, Kinder, as the present German Kaiser is said to do, the Bushido ideal of womanhood was preeminently domestic. These seeming ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... himself up as he stood, and recited the rules for the various ways in which the English sound "oh" may be represented in Swedish, giving the proper examples under the rule. This little Nono could rattle off in grand school-recitation style, though these etymological gymnastics never bore on his ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker |
