"Etymologist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... divines, and philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teutonic language except English, which indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... torrents of the rainy season, as well as the isolated hillocks, clothed in wood, which look like huge hay-cocks,—those, for instance, which rise in the rear of Cap Haytien. The aspect of the higher hills in the interior might mislead an etymologist to derive the word morne from the French adjective which means gloomy, they are so marked by the ravages of the hurricane and earthquake, so ploughed up into decrepit features by the rains, the pitiless vertical heat, the fires, and the landslides. The soft rock cannot preserve ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... fact. With certain qualifications, an etymology may have a scientific value; without those qualifications, it may become not only unscientific but mischievous. Again, nothing seems a more difficult lesson for an etymologist to learn than to say, Ido not know. Yet to my mind, nothing shows, for instance, the truly scholarlike mind of Professor Curtius better than the very fact for which he has been so often blamed, viz.: his passing over in silence the words ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller |
