Il6 TRANSACTIONS iSqQ-'oO 



" The grand old gardener and his wife 

 Smile at the claims of long descent." 



The worthy couple no doubt know that there is no getting back 

 of themselves, and that they were, on the whole, not much to 

 boast of. If that is not why they are smiling I give it up. 

 Some of you will remember too, what Thucydides says about the 

 origin of the Athenian people. He says that many stories were 

 afloat in his time, tending to show that the Athenians had a 

 very glorious ancestry, but that, as far as he could make out by 

 research, their beginnings were of a very ordinary and common- 

 place kind. Well, as it is with nations and families, so it is with 

 words : trace them back far enough and you come to some- 

 to something very ordinary. Words, like families have their 

 fortunes. Some gather beauty and honor as they come down the 

 ages, and some gather shame and ill-repute. Let us take a few 

 examples. "Curse " and " swear " are very ill-sounding words, 

 but one is only a modified form of "cross," (in its religious 

 sense) and the other is simply old English for " to declare." 

 To "anszver'' is simply to swear or declare back. A "miscreant" 

 is properly one who hasn't the right form of belief — a mis- 

 believer. The word " monster " carries us back to Virgil's 



" Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum;" 



but essentially it means something to point at, or as we might say, 

 a show. "Muster" is the same word modified, meaning 

 literally a "show up," if we may use the expression. We talk of 

 "a good muster," but the adjectives that go with "monster" are 

 all of the most defamatory kind. That popular form of impreca- 

 tion which the Captain of the Pinafore used so sparingly comes 

 from the same comparatively innocent word which yields us 

 "damage." The word "horrid" meant originally "rough," and 

 "hideous," (lyatin, hispidtis) had a meaning very similar. The 

 word "outrage," which always suggests something terrible, has 

 nothing to do with "rage," its origin is to be found in the Latin 

 "ultra," whence the French "outre," which gives the verb 

 "outrer," to carry things too far, the latter in due course yielding 

 the noun ' 'outrage, ' ' the carrying of something too far. A ' 'demon' ' 

 with us is a very bad kind of devil; but the daemon of Socrates was 

 something half way between conscience and a guardian angel. 

 The general meaning of the word in classical Greek was "a god," 



