Words for All Seasons - Introduction

At some point in the rose-tinted future, my website will be handsome. It will also have tabs at the top to allow you to navigate between the sorts of things I write. For now, I must make do with this highly inefficient system of entries in series (rather than in parallel), so please accept my apologies.

My next trick is for lovers of the English language, where I brush the dust off of those old and pretty words which civilization forgot. Many beautiful people do just this, but, while like good librarians they catalogue the titles, they often forget to open the covers, to read, and to smell the pages fragrant with decomposition - rosin from the ink, vanillin and alchohols from the wood pulp. The soul of words is their historical meaning, and for this we must have context. The words here will come with the sentences where I found them, and their (historical) definitions and etymologies as given in the OED.

Collins, n.:
A letter of thanks for entertainment or hospitality, sent by a departed guest; a ‘bread-and-butter’ letter.
Etym: The name of a character, William Collins, in Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice (ch. xxii)!
"When he left, his thanks were never formal; delicacy, humour and affection, often adorned with a sketch or a poem, turned the briefest note into a treasured literary possession. He was certainly the greatest writer of Collinses in English social history."
R. Speaight (1957) p.513 Hilaire Belloc