Commonly it is seen that they that be rich are lofty and stout.—Latimer, Sermons, p. 545.
Old Proverb.
Shakespeare, Coriolanus, act iii. sc. 2.
Stove. This word, which was probably introduced from Holland, has much narrowed its meaning. Bath, hothouse, any room where air or water was artificially heated, was a ‘stove’ once.
When a certain Frenchman came to visit Melanchthon, he found him in his stove, with one hand dandling his child in the swaddling-clouts, and the other holding a book and reading it.—Fuller, Holy State, b. ii. c. 9.
How tedious is it to them that live in stoves and caves half a year together, as in Iceland, Muscovy, or under the pole!—Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part i. sect. 2.
When most of the waiters were commanded away to their supper, the parlour or stove being nearly emptied, in came a company of musketeers, shot every one his man, and so proceeded to an apothecary’s house, where Wallenstein lay.—Letters and Despatches of Thomas Earl of Strafford, vol. i. p. 226.
Street. This, one of the words which the Romans left behind them when they quitted Britain, and which the Saxons learned from the Britons, is more properly a road or causeway (‘via strata’) than a street, in our present sense of the word; and as late as Coverdale was so used.
For they soughte them thorow every strete, and yet they founde them not.—Josh. ii. 22. Coverdale.
But when one sawe that all the people stode there still, he removed Amasa from the strete unto the felde.—1 Sam. xx. 12. Coverdale.
Sublime. There is an occasional use of ‘sublime’ by our earlier poets, a use in which it bears much the meaning of the Greek ὑπερήφανος, or perhaps approaches still more closely to that of μετέωρος, high and lifted up, as with pride; which has now quite departed from it.
Spenser, Fairy Queen, v. 8, 30.
Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1669.
Sue. One now ‘sues’ or follows another into the courts of law, being, as in the legal language of Greece, ὁ διώκων, the ‘pursuer;’ but ‘to sue’ was once to follow, without any such limitation of meaning.
If thou wolt be perfite, go, and sille alle thingis that thou hast, and come, and sue me.—Matt. xix. 21. Wiclif.
And anoon thei leften the nettis and sueden hym.—Mark i. 19. Id.
Sure. Used once in the sense of affianced, or, as it would be sometimes called, ‘hand-fasted.’ See ‘Assure,’ ‘Ensure.’
The king was sure to dame Elizabeth Lucy, and her husband before God.—Sir T. More, History of King Richard III.
| Suspect, | } |
| Suspicion. |
To ‘suspect’ is properly to look under, and out of this fact is derived our present use of the word; but in looking under you may also look up, and herein lies the explanation of an occasional use of ‘suspect’ and ‘suspicion’ which we find in our early writers.
Pelopidas being sent the second time into Thessaly, to make accord betwixt the people and Alexander, the tyrant of Pheres, was by this tyrant (not suspecting the dignity of an ambassador, nor of his country) made prisoner.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 927.
If God do intimate to the spirit of any wise inferiors that they ought to reprove, then let them suspect their own persons, and beware that they make no open contestation, but be content with privacy.—Rogers, Naaman the Syrian, p. 330.
Cordeilla, out of mere love, without the suspicion of expected reward, at the message only of her father in distress, pours forth true filial tears.—Milton, History of England, b. i.
Sycophant. The early meaning of ‘sycophant,’ when it was employed as equivalent to informer, delator, calumniator, ‘promoter’ (which see), agreed better with its use in the Greek than does our present. Employing it now in the sense of false and fawning flatterer, we might seem at first sight to employ it in a sense not merely altogether unconnected with, but quite opposite to, its former. Yet indeed there is a very deep inner connexion between the two uses. It is not for nothing that Jeremy Taylor treats of these two, namely ‘Of Slander and Flattery,’ in one and the same course of sermons; seeing that, as the Italian proverb has taught us, ‘He who flatters me before, spatters me behind.’
The poor man, that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the sycophant or promoter.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 261.
He [St. Paul] in peril of the wilderness, that is of wild beasts; they [rich men] not only of the wild beast called the sycophant, but of the tame beast too, called the flatterer.—Andrewes, Sermon preached at the Spittle.
Sanders, that malicious sycophant, will have no less than twenty-six wain-load of silver, gold, and precious stones to be seized into the king’s hands by the spoil of that monument.—Heylin, History of the Reformation, 1849, vol. i. p. 20.
Symbol. The employment of ‘symbol’ in its proper Greek sense of contribution thrown into a common stock, as in a pic-nic or the like, is frequent in Jeremy Taylor, and examples of it may be found in other scholarly writers of the seventeenth century.
The consideration of these things hath oft suggested, and at length persuaded me to make this attempt, to cast in my mite to this treasury, my symbolum toward so charitable a work.—Hammond, A Paraphrase on the Psalms, Preface.
Christ hath finished his own sufferings for expiation of the world; yet there are ‘portions that are behind of the sufferings’ of Christ, which must be filled up by his body the Church; and happy are they that put in the greatest symbol; for ‘in the same measure you are partakers of the sufferings of Christ, in the same shall ye be also of the consolation.’—Bishop Taylor, The Faith and Patience of the Saints.
There [in Westminster Abbey] the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes, mingle their dust and pay down their symbol of mortality.—Id., Holy Dying, c. i. § 2.
Table. The Latin ‘tabula’ had for one of its meanings picture or painting; and this caused that ‘table’ was by our early writers used often in the same meaning.
The table wherein Detraction was expressed, he [Apelles] painted in this form.—Sir T. Elyot, The Governor, b. iii. c. 27.
You shall see, as it were in a table painted before your eyes, the evil-favouredness and deformity of this most detestable vice.—Homilies: Against Contention.
Learning flourished yet in the city of Sicyon, and they esteemed the painting of tables in that city to be the perfectest for true colours and fine drawing, of all other places.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 843.
Taint. This and ‘tint’ or ‘teint,’ the one connected more closely with the French, the other with the Italian form of the word, have divided off from one another, but own a common origin—‘tingo,’ ‘tinctus.’ The fact that discoloration commonly accompanies decay explains our present use of ‘taint.’
A most delicate and beautiful young lady, slender of body, tall of stature, fair of taynt and complexion.—Reynolds, God’s Revenge against Murther, b. i. hist. 1.
Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, sc. 1.
Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI., act iii. sc. 1.
Talent. The original meaning, as of ‘talent’ in Old French, ‘talento’ in Italian, ‘talante’ in Spanish, was will, inclination, from ‘talentum’ (τάλαντον), balance, scales, and then inclination of balance; thus in Spenser (Fairy Queen, iii. 4, 61), ‘maltalent’ is grudge or ill-will (compare Old French ‘maltalant’ in the Chanson de Roland, 271). It is probably under the influence of the Parable of the Talents (Matt. xxv.) that it has travelled to its present meaning. Clarendon still employs it very distinctly in its older sense.
Whoso then wold wel understonde these peines, and bethinke him wel that he hath deserved these peines for his sinnes, certes he shold have more talent for to sighe and to wepe than for to singe and playe.—Chaucer, The Persones Tale.
The meaner sort rested not there, but creating for their leader Sir John Egremond, a factious person and one who had of a long time borne an ill talent towards the king, entered into open rebellion.—Bacon, History of King Henry VII.
Though the nation generally was without any ill talent to the Church, either in the point of the doctrine or the discipline, yet they were not without a jealousy that Popery was not enough discountenanced.—Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, b. i. c. 194.
Tall. [This word occurs in earlier English with a great variety of meanings. A very common meaning is seemly, fine, elegant; for examples see Oliphant’s New English (index). In old plays it often meant valiant, brave, great (Halliwell). In the Complaint of Mars ‘talle’ occurs, apparently in the sense of obedient, docile (see Skeat, Minor Poems of Chaucer, iv. 38). The word in the sense of lofty in stature may perhaps be distinct from the above ‘tall’; at any rate the modern sense of tall seems to be the primary one in the Welsh and Cornish tal, high. See Skeat’s Dictionary.]
Tal, or semely, Decens, elegans.—Promptorium.
He [the Earl of Richmond’s] companions being almost in despair of victory were suddenly recomforted by Sir William Stanley, which came to succours with three thousand tall men.—Grafton, Chronicle.
Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, part ii. act iv. sc. 4.
He [Prince Edward] would proffer to fight with any mean person, if cried up for a tall man.—Fuller, Holy War, b. iv. c. 29.
Tarpaulin. Not any longer used in the sense of sailor, except in the shorter form of ‘tar.’ See the quotation from Smollett, s. v. ‘Companion.’
The Archbishop of Bordeaux is at present General of the French naval forces, who though a priest, is yet permitted to turn tarpaulin and soldier.--Turkish Spy, Letter 2.
Tawdry. ‘Tawdry’ laces and such like were cheap and showy articles of finery bought at St. Etheldrida’s or St. Awdry’s fair; but it is only in later times that this cheapness, showiness, with a further suggestion of vulgarity, made themselves distinctly felt in the word. [The Old English form of ‘Etheldrida’ was ‘Æthelthry̅th,’ which means noble strength. See Sweet, Oldest English Texts, p. 638.]
Spenser, Shepherd’s Calendar, Fourth Eclogue.
Come, you promised me a tawdry lace and a pair of sweet gloves.—Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale, act iv. sc. 3.
Temper. What has been said under ‘Humour,’ which see, will also explain ‘Temper,’ and the earlier uses of it which we meet. The happy ‘temper’ would be the happy mixture, the blending in due proportions, of the four principal ‘humours’ of the body.
The exquisiteness of his [the Saviour’s] bodily temper increased the exquisiteness of his torment, and the ingenuity of his soul added to his sensibleness of the indignities and affronts offered to him.—Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, vol. i. p. 345.
Concupiscence itself follows the crasis and temperature of the body. If you would know why one man is proud, another cruel, another intemperate or luxurious, you are not to repair so much to Aristotle’s ethics, or to the writings of other moralists, as to those of Galen, or of some anatomists, to find the reason of these different tempers.—South, Sermons, 1744, vol. ii. p. 5.
Temperament. The Latin ‘temperamentum’ had sometimes very nearly the sense of our English ‘compromise’ or the French ‘transaction,’ and signified, as these do, a middle term reached by mutual concession, by a tempering of the extreme claims upon either side. This same use of ‘temperament’ appears from time to time in such of our writers as have allowed their style to be modified by their Latin studies.
Safest, therefore, to me it seems that none of the Council be moved unless by death, or just conviction of some crime. However, I forejudge not any probable expedient, any temperament that can be found in things of this nature, so disputable on either side.—Milton, The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.
Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had a notion that it [Observations on the Minority] should meet the public eye.—Burke, Letter to Lawrence.
Termagant. A name at this present applied only to women of fierce temper and ungoverned tongue, but formerly to men and women alike; and indeed predominantly to men; ‘Termagant’ in the popular notion being the name of one of the three gods of the Saracens. [See Mayhew-Skeat, Dict. of Middle English (s. v. ‘Tervagant’).]
Art thou so fierce, currish, and churlish a Nabal, that even when thou mightest live in the midst of thy people (as she told Elisha [2 Kings iv. 13]), thou delightest to play the tyrant and termagant among them?—Rogers, Naaman the Syrian, p. 270.
This would make a saint swear like a soldier, and a soldier like Termagant.—Beaumont and Fletcher, King or No King.
Thews. It is a remarkable evidence of the influence of Shakespeare upon the English language, that while, so far as yet has been observed, every other writer, one single instance excepted, employs ‘thews’ in the sense of manners, qualities of mind and disposition, his employment of it in the sense of nerves, muscular vigour, has quite overborne the other; which, once so familiar in our literature, has now quite passed away. See a valuable note in Craik’s English of Shakespeare, p. 117.
Chaucer, Legend of Good Women (Skeat, p. 118).
Spenser, Fairy Queen, ii. 1, 33.
Id., ib., 10, 59.
| Think, | } |
| Thought, | |
| Thoughtful. |
Many, as they read or hear in our English Bible these words of our Lord, ‘Take no thought for your life’ (Matt. vi. 25; cf. 1 Sam. ix. 5), are perplexed, for they cannot help feeling that there is some exaggeration in them, that He is urging here something which is impossible, and which, if possible, would not be desirable, but a forfeiting of the true dignity of man. Or perhaps, if they are able to compare the English with the Greek, they blame our Translators for having given an emphasis to the precept which it did not possess in the original. But neither is the fact. ‘Thought’ is constantly anxious care in our earlier English, as the examples which follow will abundantly prove; and ‘to think,’ though not so frequently, is to take anxious care. To this day they will say in Yorkshire, ‘it was thought that did for her,’ meaning that it was care that killed her.
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act iii. sc. 13.
Skelton, Manerly Margery.
He so plagued and vexed his father with injurious indignities, that the old man for very thought and grief of heart pined away and died.—Holland, Camden’s Ireland, p. 120.
In five hundred years only two queens have died in childbirth. Queen Catherine Parr died rather of thought.—Somers’ Tracts (Reign of Elizabeth), vol. i. p. 172.
Harris, an alderman of London, was put in trouble, and died of thought and anxiety before his business came to an end.—Bacon, History of Henry VII.
Lydgate, Lyf of Our Lady.
Thrifty. The ‘thrifty’ is on the way to be the thriving; yet ‘thrifty’ does not mean thriving now, as once it did. It still indeed retains this meaning in provincial use; as I have heard a newly-transplanted tree, which was doing well, described as ‘thrifty.’ See ‘Unthrifty;’ and the quotation from Tusser, s. v. ‘Family.’
No grace hath more abundant promises made unto it than this of mercy, a sowing, a reaping, a thrifty grace.—Bishop Reynolds, Sermon 30.
Tidy. This, identical with the German ‘zeitig,’ has lost that reference to time which in ‘noontide,’ ‘eventide,’ and some other compounds still survives.
Genesis and Exodus, 2104.
Lo an erthetilier abidith preciouse fruyt of the erthe, paciently suffrynge til he resseyve tymeful and lateful fruit—that is tidi and ripe.—James v. 7. Wiclif.
Tinsel. This (the Old French ‘estincelle,’ a spark) is always now cheap finery, flashing like silver and gold, but at the same time pretending a value and a richness which it does not really possess. There lay no such insinuation of pretentious splendour in its earlier uses. A valuable note in Keightley’s Milton, vol. i. p. 126, makes it, I think, clear that by ‘tinsel’ was commonly meant ‘a silver texture, less dense and stout than cloth of silver;’ yet not always, for see my first quotation.
Under a duke, no man to wear cloth of gold tinsel.—Literary Remains of King Edward VI., 1551, 2.
Every place was hanged with cloth of gold, cloth of silver, tinsel, arras, tapestry, and what not.—Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, p. 18.
Gascoigne, The Steel Glass.
Spenser, Fairy Queen, iii. 1, 15.
Tobacconist. Now the seller, once the smoker, of tobacco.
Germany hath not so many drunkards, England tobacconists, France dancers, Holland mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands.—Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part iii. sect. 3.
Hence it is that the lungs of the tobacconist are rotted.—Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair.
Sylvester, Tobacco Battered.
Tory. It is curious how often political parties have ended by assuming to themselves names first fastened on them by their adversaries in reproach and scorn. The ‘Gueux’ or ‘Beggars’ of Holland are perhaps the most notable instance of all; so too ‘tories’ was a name properly belonging to the Irish bogtrotters, who during our Civil War robbed and plundered, professing to be in arms for the maintenance of the royal cause; and from them transferred, about the year 1680, to those who sought to maintain the extreme prerogatives of the Crown. There is an Act of the 6th of Anne with this title: ‘For the more effectual suppressing Tories and Rapparees; and for preventing persons becoming Tories or resorting to them.’ For the best account of the ‘tories’ see Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, pp. 163-183; and compare Carte’s Life of the Duke of Ormonde, vol. ii. p. 481.
That Irish Papists who had been licensed to depart this nation, and of late years have been transplanted into Spain, Flanders, and other foreign parts, have nevertheless secretly returned into Ireland, occasioning the increase of tories and other lawless persons.—Irish State Papers, 24th January, 1656.
Let such men quit all pretences to civility and breeding. They are ruder than tories and wild Americans.—Glanville, Sermons, p. 212.
In the open or plain countries the peasants are content to live on their labour; the woods, bogs, and fastnesses fostering and sheltering the robbers, tories, and woodkerns, who are usually the offspring of gentlemen, that have either misspent or forfeited their estates; who, though having no subsistance, yet contemn trade, as being too mean and base for a gentleman reduced never so low.—MS. Account of the State of the County of Kildare, of date 1684, in Trinity College Library, Dublin.
Mosstroopers, a sort of rebels in the northern part of Scotland, that live by robbery and spoil, like the tories in Ireland, or the banditti in Italy.—Phillips, New World of Words, ed. 1706.
Trade. Properly that path which we ‘tread,’ and thus the ever recurring habit and manner of our life, whatever this may be.
Earl of Surrey, Translation of the Æneid, b. ii. l. 592.
For him that lacketh nothing necessary, nor hath cause to complain of his present state, it is a great folly to leave his old acquainted trade of life, and to enter into another new and unknown.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 53.
Teach a child in the trade of his way, and when he is old, he shall not depart from it.—Proverbs xxii. 6. Geneva.
Spenser, Fairy Queen, ii. 12, 30.
Ib., ii. 6, 39.
Treacle. This at present means only the sweet syrup of molasses, but was once of far wider reach and far nobler significance, having come to us from afar, and by steps which are curious to trace. They are these. The Greeks, in anticipation of modern homœopathy, called a fancied antidote to the viper’s bite, which was composed of the viper’s flesh, θηριακά—from θηρίον, a name often given to the viper (Acts xxviii. 5); of this came the Latin ‘theriaca,’ from the Old French form of which—namely, ‘triacle’—came our ‘triacle’ and ‘treacle.’ See Promptorium, and Mayhew-Skeat, Dict. of Middle English, p. 237.
For a most strong treacle against these venomous heresies wrought our Saviour many a marvellous miracle.—Sir T. More, A Treatise on the Passion, Works, p. 1357.
There is no more triacle at Galaad, and there is no phisician that can heale the hurte of my people.—Jer. viii. 22. Coverdale.
At last his body [Sir Thomas Overbury’s] was almost come by use of poisons to the state that Mithridates’ body was by the use of treacle and preservatives, that the force of the poisons was blunted upon him.—Bacon, Charge against Robert, Earl of Somerset.
The saints’ experiences help them to a sovereign treacle made of the scorpion’s own flesh (which they through Christ have slain), and that hath a virtue above all others to expel the venom of Satan’s temptations from the heart.—Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour, c. ix. § 2.
Wonderful therefore is the power of a Christian, who not only overcomes and conquers and kills the viper, but like the skilful apothecary makes antidote and triacle of him.—Hales, Sermon on Christian Omnipotence.
Treacle; a physical composition, made of vipers and other ingredients.—Phillips, New World of Words.
Tree. This might once have been used of the dead timber, no less than of the living growth; this use surviving still in ‘roodtree,’ ‘axletree,’ ‘saddletree.’
In a greet hous ben not oneli vessels of gold and of silver, but also of tree [lignea, Vulg.] and of erthe.—2 Tim. ii. 20. Wiclif.
He had a castel of tre, which he cleped Mategrifon.—Capgrave, Chronicle of England, p. 145.
Old Ballad.
Triumph. A name often transferred by our early writers to any stately show or pageantry whatever, not restricted, as now, to one celebrating a victory. See Bacon’s Essay, the 37th, with the heading ‘Of Masks and Triumphs,’ passim.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, act ii. sc. 2.
You cannot have a perfect palace except you have two several sides, the one for feasts and triumphs, the other for dwelling.—Bacon, Essays, 45.
Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1311.
Trivial. A ‘trivial’ saying is at present a slight one; it was formerly an often-repeated one, or one containing an elementary truth; it might be trite, on the ground of the weight and wisdom which it contained; as certainly the maxim quoted by Hacket is anything but ‘trivial’ in our sense of the word. Gradually the notion of slightness was superadded to that of commonness, and thus an epithet once of honour has become one of dishonour rather. See Mayhew-Skeat, Dict. of Middle English (s. v. ‘Trivials’).
Others avouch, and that more truly, that he [Duns Scotus] was born in Downe, and thereof they guess him to be named Dunensis, and by contraction Duns, which term is so trivial and common in schools, that whoso surpasseth others either in cavilling sophistry or subtle philosophy is forthwith nicknamed a Duns.—Stanyhurst, Description of Ireland, p. 2.
Æquitas optimo cuique notissima, is a trivial saying, A very good man cannot be ignorant of equity.—Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, part i. p. 57.
These branches [of the divine life] are three, whose names though trivial and vulgar, yet, if rightly understood, they bear such a sense with them that nothing more weighty can be pronounced by the tongue of men or seraphims, and in brief they are these, Charity, Humility, and Purity.—H. More, Grand Mystery of Godliness, b. ii. c. 12.
Trumpery. That which is deceitful is without any worth; and ‘trumpery,’ which was formerly deceit, fraud (tromperie), is now anything which is worthless and of no account. Was Milton’s use of the word in his well-known line, ‘Black, white and gray, with all their trumpery’ (P. L. iii. 475), our present, or that earlier?
Sir J. Harington, Orlando Furioso, b. vii.
Britannicus was now grown to men’s estate, a true and worthy plant to receive his father’s empire; which a grafted son by adoption now possessed by the injury and trumpery of his mother.—Greenwey, Tacitus, p. 182.
Turk. It is a remarkable evidence of the extent to which the Turks and the Turkish assault upon Christendom had impressed themselves on the minds of men, of the way in which they stood as representing the entire Mahometan world, that ‘Turk,’ being in fact a national, is constantly employed by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a religious, designation, as equivalent to, and coextensive with, Mahometan; exactly as Ἔλλην in the New Testament means continually not of Greek nationality, but of Gentile religion.
Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics.—Collect for Good Friday.
It is no good reason for a man’s religion, that he was born and brought up in it; for then a Turk would have as much reason to be a Turk as a Christian to be a Christian.—Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, part i. c. 2.
| Tutor, | } |
| Tuition. |
The ‘tutor’ of our forefathers was rather a caretaker and guardian than an instructor: but seeing that one defends another most effectually who imparts to him those principles and that knowledge whereby he shall be able to defend himself, our modern use of the word must be taken as a deeper than the earlier.
This is part of the honour that the children owe to their parents and tutors by the commandment of God, even to be bestowed in marriage as it pleaseth the godly, prudent and honest parents or tutors to appoint.—Becon, Catechism, Parker Soc. ed., p. 871.
What shall become of the lambs under the tuition of wolves?—Adams, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 117.
Tutors and guardians are in the place of parents; and what they are in fiction of law they must remember as an argument to engage them to do in reality of duty.—Bishop Taylor, Holy Living, iii. 2.
As though they were not to be trusted with the king’s brother, that by the assent of the nobles of the land were appointed, as the king’s nearest friends, to the tuition of his own royal person.—Sir T. More, History of King Richard III., p. 36.
Afterwards turning his speech to his wife and his son, he [Scanderbeg] commended them both with his kingdom to the tuition of the Venetians.—Knolles, History of the Turks, vol. i. p. 274.
| Umbrage, | } |
| Umbrageous. |
‘To take umbrage’ is, I think, the only phrase in which the word ‘umbrage’ is still in use among us, the only one at least in which it is ethically employed; but ‘umbrage’ in its earlier use coincides in meaning with the old French ‘ombrage’ (see the quotation from Bacon), and signifies suspicion, or rather the disposition to suspect; and ‘umbrageous,’ as far as I know, is constantly employed in the sense of suspicious by our early authors; having now no other but a literal sense. Other uses of ‘umbrage,’ as those of Fuller and Jeremy Taylor which follow, must be explained from the classical sympathies of these writers; out of which the Latin etymology of the word gradually made itself felt in the meaning which they ascribed to it, namely as anything slight and shadowy. [For the development of meaning of the French ‘ombrage’ from shadow to suspicion, see Darmesteter, Vie des Mots, p. 77.]
I say, just fear, not out of umbrages, light jealousies, apprehensions afar off, but out of clear foresight of imminent danger.—Bacon, Of a War with Spain.
To collect the several essays of princes glancing on that project [a new Crusade], were a task of great pains and small profit; especially some of them being umbrages and state representations rather than realities, to ingratiate princes with their subjects, or with the oratory of so pious a project to woo money out of people’s purses.—Fuller, Holy War, b. v. c. 25.
You look for it [truth] in your books, and you tug hard for it in your disputations, and you derive it from the cisterns of the Fathers, and you inquire after the old ways; and sometimes are taken with new appearances, and you rejoice in false lights, or are delighted with little umbrages or peep of day.—Bishop Taylor, Sermon preached to the University of Dublin.
There being in the Old Testament thirteen types and umbrages of this Holy Sacrament, eleven of them are of meat and drink.—Id., The Worthy Communicant, c. ii. § 2.
At the beginning some men were a little umbrageous, and startling at the name of the Fathers; yet since the Fathers have been well studied, we have behaved ourselves with more reverence toward the Fathers than they of the Roman persuasion have done.—Donne, Sermons, 1640, p. 557.
That there was none other present but himself when his master De Merson was murdered, it is umbrageous, and leaves a spice of fear and sting of suspicion in their heads.—Reynolds, God’s Revenge against Murther, b. iii. hist. 13.
Uncouth. Now unformed in manner, ungraceful in behaviour; but once simply unknown. The change in signification is to be traced to the same causes which made ‘barbarous,’ meaning at first only foreign, to have afterwards the sense of savage and wild. Almost all nations regard with disfavour and dislike that which is outlandish, and generally that with which they are unacquainted; so that words which at first did but express this fact of strangeness, easily acquire a further unfavourable sense.
The vulgar instruction requires also vulgar and communicable terms, not clerkly or uncouth, as are all these of the Greek and Latin languages.—Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, b. iii. c. 10.
Spenser, The Shepherd’s Calendar, September.
‘Uncouthe, unkiste,’ sayde the old famous poete Chaucer; which proverb very well taketh place in this our new poete, who for that he is uncouthe (as said Chaucer) is unkist; and, unknown to most men, is regarded but of a few.—E. K., Epistle Dedicatory prefixed to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.
Unequal. From the constant use made of ‘unequal’ by our early writers, for whom it was entirely equivalent to unjust, unfair, one might almost suppose they were influenced by sense association with ‘iniquus’ in their naturalization of ‘inæqualis.’ At any rate they had no scruple in using it in a sense, which ‘inæqualis’ never has, but ‘iniquus’ continually.