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Review
"...a brilliant book addressed to students and to lay people alike, unbaffling, deeply informative, and timelessly persuasive." Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary
Book Description
IN this chapter we shall have to consider Greek phusis, Latin natura (with its derivatives), and English kind. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Studies in Words (Paperback)
This is a very interesting book, though it is not easy to read. Don't approach it thinking it is a book to be read quickly. . . I feel as though I were sitting in lectures, and I have to read it slowly, to be sure I'm getting all that Lewis is trying to say. If you have an interest in etemology, you'll enjoy this book. Read it in small bits, digest them over a day or two and then read some more!
4.0 out of 5 stars
An intimidating and dazzling bit of scholarship,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Studies in Words (Paperback)
As in his other works on Medieval literature, Lewis here displays a breathtaking range of learning and scholarship. The endless hours which he must have spent hunched over his desk, his pipe in his mouth, poring over volumes of Latin and Anglo-Saxon poetry, are more clearly evident in a book like this than any biographer could make them. It's more than a little intimidating to realize just how much one hasn't read.The strongest impression that this book has left on me is of how carefully and thoughtfully Lewis must have approached his reading. I suspect I am myself one of those who imposes the "dangerous sense" (i.e., the modern sense) onto a word when I encounter it in earlier literature, without recognizing that the meaning the author intended would have been subtly different. And it is precisely those times when the difference is most subtle that the difference is the most dangerous. I found myself somewhat exhausted by the immense range of literature from which Lewis drew his examples. Finding examples of "life" in the works of George Bernard Shaw or G. K. Chesterton probably wasn't difficult; but he quotes just as freely from Rider Haggard, Coleridge, Chaucer, Spenser, Hobbes, Ovid, Lucretius, Seneca, Plato and Aristotle -- as well as writers and works I'd never heard of before. What's most depressing is that I couldn't have pulled these sorts of examples even out of the writers that I have read. Oh well. We can't all be geniuses. The book also challenged me to be more precise in my writing. Several times, as Lewis marched inexorably through the millennia, tracing a word from Homer to Chesterton, I was reminded of those occasions when Lewis describes "The Great Knock" (William Kirkpatrick), Lewis' early tutor, trapping a covey of female bridge players, "begging them to clarify their terms". Lewis' own writing was unusually strong and clear, even in passages markedly beref of stylistic adornments. I suspect that this was largely the result of his careful and precise use of words: never saying more or less than what he meant, never throwing in a word just for effect, and always clearly aware of the precise effect that his chosen words would have. As is often the case, I enjoyed the opening and concluding essays the most. The chapter on "Life" was probably the most polemic -- but even there, only subtly so -- and probably for that reason the most interesting. The other essays, on "wit", "free", "nature", "simple", "sense" and "world", for instance, were interesting and informative, but not helpful in the sense that I'll likely find a use for their content. Again, it makes all the difference whether you're a medieval scholar or just a Lewis fan.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Etymology of 11 words/phrases,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Studies in Words (Paperback)
This book traces the changes to the meanings of eleven words over the centuries: nature, sense, sad, wit, free, simple, conscience and conscious, world, life, and 'I dare say'. This book may be a little too specialized for the general reader, but it is not so esoteric that it cannot be read with pleasure by anyone interested in word meanings. Even though I'm no student of English literature or etymology, I did enjoy reading this book.
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