Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/16

Rh Without its help I could not have drawn up the lists of the new terms that cropped up between 1300 and 1500.

I must apologize to those of my readers, who are unlearned, for the Latin in my text; the truth is, that there are so many shades of meaning in our words, that I cannot thoroughly explain myself with&shy;out falling back upon the foreign tongue. When specifying English words, I have almost wholly con&shy;fined myself to terms in use in 1873; of these, about fifteen hundred, I think, occur in my pages. In a work like this, ranging over the monuments of twelve hundred years, mistakes will be made; I have no doubt that I have sometimes assigned to a new word a date later than its real first appearance in England.

It is but fair to warn those who love to call a spade ‘an horticultural implement,’ that they will not relish my Sixth Chapter.