Monday 18 January 2016

'Etymology'

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.
- Richard Hackluyt*, Principal Navigations (in Melville, Moby-Dick: 'Etymology - Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School')

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* wonderfully misspelled by Melville, in all his sanctimony

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