Читать книгу The Romance of Words (4th ed.) - Ernest Weekley - Страница 9

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[6] Abominable is regularly spelt abhominable in late Old French and Mid. English, as though meaning "inhuman," Lat. homo, homin-, a man.

[7] This etymology is doubted by some authorities.

[8] But the word comes to us from French. In the 16th century such puzzles were called rébus de Picardie, because of their popularity in that province.

[9] For simplicity the term Old French is used here to include all words not in modern use. Where a modern form exists it is given in parentheses.

[10] The name was thus applied to a sail before it was given to a mast. Although the Italian word means "middle," it is perhaps, in this particular sense, a popular corruption of an Arabic word of quite different meaning. The discussion of so difficult a problem is rather out of place in a book intended for the general reader, but I cannot refrain from giving a most interesting note which I owe to Mr. W. B. Whall, Master Mariner, the author of Shakespeare's Sea Terms Explained—"The sail was (until c. 1780) lateen, i.e., triangular, like the sail of a galley. The Saracens, or Moors, were the great galley sailors of the Mediterranean, and mizen comes from Arab., miezên, balance. The mizen is, even now, a sail that 'balances,' and the reef in a mizen is still called the 'balance' reef."

[11] "I have endeavoured to moderate his tyrannical choler" (Urquhart's Translation, 1653).

[12] The credit of first using the word in the political sense is claimed both for George Jacob Holyoake and Professor Minto.

[13] From Anglo-Sax. mān, deceit, cognate with the first syllable of Ger. Meineid, perjury.

[14] This word, which looks like an unsuccessful palindrome, belongs to the language of medieval magic. It seems to be artificially elaborated from ἀβραξάς, a word of Persian origin used by a sect of Greek gnostics. Its letters make up the magic number 365, supposed to represent the number of spirits subject to the supreme being.

[15] In coining vril Lytton probably had in mind Lat. vis, vires, power, or the adjective virilis.