05-27-2014, 07:06 AM | #16 |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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05-27-2014, 07:18 AM | #17 |
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A good one is the verb "to gerrymander" which was coined in 1812, when Governor Gerry of Massachusetts redrew political boundaries so tortuously that a newspaper editor claimed that one district had acquired the shape of a salamander.
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05-27-2014, 07:27 AM | #18 |
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Some uses of nouns as verbs are surprisingly recent. Eg, "to access" (meaning "to gain access to") was coined as a computing term in 1962. Prior to that, the word existed only as a noun.
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05-27-2014, 07:48 AM | #19 |
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In addition to words of recent origin, there are words whose meaning has completely changed over the years. For example, the phrase "by and by" is most often defined as an unspecified, future time and place, but in 1611, when the King James Version of the Bible was published, it meant "immediately."
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05-27-2014, 07:50 AM | #20 | |
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Quote:
The word which has changed its meaning most often over the course of the centuries is perhaps the word "nice", which originally (in the 12th century) meant "foolish" or "ignorant", had acquired the meaning of "fussy" by the 14th c, "precise" or "careful" by the 16th (which we still retain in phrases like "a nice distinction"), "agreeable" by 1769, and "kind" by 1830. It has so many meanings that the OED says "In many examples from the 16th and 17th centuries it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken". Last edited by HarryT; 05-27-2014 at 07:59 AM. |
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