Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/411

 us. vi. OCT. 26, 1912.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

339

Docks.

A Net? English Dictionary. Edited by Sir James A. H. Murray. Senatory-Several. (Vol. VIII.) By Henry Bradley. (Oxford, Clarendon Press.)

As Dr. Bradley remarks in his Introductory Xote wide diversities of sense are characteristic of a more than ordinarily large proportion of the words included in this section, and the articles are correspondingly interesting. We have here also the longest article in the ' Dictionary ' that on the verb "set," of which the idiomatic applications are more numerous than those of any other in the language. It runs to 151 sec- tions, themselves abundantly subdivided, and fills some eighteen or nineteen pages a piece of excellent work both as regards illustration and arrangement. Other long and instructive articles are those on "send," "serve," and "settle,"' and on the important group of words derived from the Latin sentire. This last has an un- usually wide historical significance, and, besides tracing out the developments of meaning in words that have established themselves, one may be entertained by observing the " shots " at in- venting words which have more or less failed. Such are " sensate," " sensical," " sentential," and one or two words tried by Huxley " sensiferous " and " sensifacient," for instance. The earliest example of " sensation " is from Crooke's ' Body of Man,' 1615, where it is used in the stricter sense ; as "a strong impression (of horror, admiration, surprise, &c.)," it is first found as early as 1779, though in the sense of " a person or event that ' creates a sensation,' " the first instance is no further back than The Times of 1804. " Sensationally " seems to have started at about this last date, and the first example given is also from a newspaper. " Sense," sb., furnishes a lengthy and highly valuable article : we noticed the illustration, beginning with Locke, and extending over 200 years, of the schoolboys' use of it : " Pray give me a little sense " i.e., material for Greek or Latin verse ; and that an example of its meaning, as equivalent of the French sens, direction, was discovered in 1707. " Sense," v., which as at present used carries something of an American flavour, has a distinct, though slender, English tradition, starting here with the end of the sixteenth century, and passing through Bunyan, Donne, and Stillingfleet. In the quotations from the last two it carries also the meaning " to explain." Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Hardy seem to have committed themselves to it without inverted commas. The ' Dictionary ' avoids the obvious : under " sensibility " the only quotation from Jane Austen is in ' Emma.' Of " sensible " a good account is given, but the well-known, quasi-technical phrase " sensible devotion " should have found a place in it. Johnson's stigmatization of its meaning " reason- able " or "judicious," as found only in " low company," is duly noted, and corroborated by a phrase in a letter of Sir Philip Francis's," in the cantword, sensible." An interesting historical extension of the meaning of " sensitive "- or, as it was also employed, " sensitivist " is its adoption as the name of that school of novelists in Holland who have sought to combine in their

work the characteristic elements of both impres- sionism and realism. To " sensitivity " we observe The Athenceum gave its sanction in 1882, The modern instances of the use of " sensual " in its neutral or favourable significance are more numerous than might have been expected : " sensuous," its general substitute, at least where art and pleasure are concerned, is imputed to Milton's invention, with the remark that C'oleridge, who revived it, was mistaken in referring it to " many of our older writers." It is interesting to observe how unstable a word it is ; already it is nearing the unfavourable sense, and it is also undergoing other degradation,, being used of climate and surroundings.

The word " sentence," though it takes up no- inordinate amount of space, yields one of the most valuable of all the articles. Much of the- interest is historical, as in the case of the mediaeval ' Book of the Sentences,' and the " Sententiary," whose office was to lecture on that famous work of Peter Lombard's. " Sententiously," in its modern use, is defined as "tersely, pithily," which seems insufficient, since it surely carries quite as constantly as the adjective does a sense of " pompousness and affectation." " Sentience," it appears, can be traced back no further than Poe, 'Fall of the House of Usher'; "senti- ment " in its present form is a reintroduction of the word in the seventeenth century, with French spelling. It is noted from ' The- Workwoman's Guide' in 1838 that there was "a necktie made of silk or velvet, and styled a ' sentiment.' "

The illustrations in general so excellent are here and there defective. Thus we are told that " send up " or " send down " is used of prices and one's spirits ; and then, v hile two instances about sails are given, none is given for " spirits."" Again, a sentence from a periodical, which itself quotes, is no real illustration of the use of " sepa- rater " to mean one who ascribes the ' Iliad ' and Odyssey ' to different authors ; and the same may be said of Chambers's ' Cyclopaedia,' quoted for " the Seraphic Doctor " as a name for St. Bonaventura. This mode of illustration is in general too frequent, and we may remark that it hardly seemed worth while to perpetuate the misprint "sceptcemia [sic]" for " septasmia " in The Daily Neics, when the word might have been found in a medical work. Here and there the applicability of the quotation is at least doubtful. Thus an obsolete use of " sere " for " thin, worn," of textile fabrics, is given under- a separate heading, and even with an example from a sixteenth - century Spanish-English dic- tionary, " where cloth is seere or thinne," which leads up temptingly to " shook the sails That were so thin and sere," yet is it likely that Cole- ridge meant " sere " in this sense, and not in that of " dry," as leaves are dry ? Again, "full many a gem of purest ray serene " is quoted as an example of " serene " used for a poetic epithet of colour, where it seems rather an epithet of undifferentiated, because only potential, light.

A large proportion of curious words and words with distant associations fall to these columns, as Horace Walpole's " Serendipity " ; the " Sep- tembrians," who believed that our Lord was born in September ; " sencion," the old name for groundsel ; " sendal " and " sendaline " ; " Seras- kier," the Turkish Minister of War ; " Sephi- roth," the " ten emanations of the Infinite " ;