Основы теории английского языка. Листунова Е.И. - 7 стр.

dead to others. And, on the other hand, there are many claimants to
admission into the recognized vocabulary (where some of them will
certainly one day be received), that are already current coin with
some speakers and writers, and not yet ‘good English’, or even not
English at all, to others.
      If we treat the division of words into current and obsolete as a
subordinate one, and extend our idea of the Language so as to include
all that has been English from the beginning, or from any particular
epoch, we enter upon a department of the subject, of which, from the
nature of the case, our exhibition must be imperfect. For the vocab-
ulary of the past times is known to us solely from its preservation in
written records; the extent of our knowledge of it depends entirely
upon the completeness of the records, and the completeness of our
acquaintance with them. And the farther back we go, the more imper-
fect are the records, the smaller is the fragment of the actual vocabu-
lary that we can recover.
                                 G.A.H. Murray. General Explanations.
      III.
      Study the following passage.
      In his fascinating, recent book, Studies in Words, Professor
C.S. Lewis explains the steps by which even an apparently simple
word like sad has radically changed its meaning over the years. It
once meant ‘full to the brim’, ‘well-fed’; one could be thoroughly
‘sad’ with food and drink (sated, satiated, satisfied and saturated are
etymologically related to it). From this it came to mean ‘solid’ as well;
a good spear could be ‘sad’, and one could sleep ‘sadly’. This idea of
solidness was then metaphorically applied to human character, and a
person who was reliable and firm could be called ‘sad’. It is now easy
to see how the chief modern sense could come into existence; a well-
fed person may feel solid, heavy and dull, and thus be sober-faced on
that, account: we must not forget the slang use of the expression fed-
up which offers something of a semantic parallel. Alternatively a person
who is reliable and firm is a serious person, and serious is the opposite
of light-hearted and gay.
                                   Randolph Quirk.The Use of English.
     IIIa.
     Below are listed the original meanings of some simple words. As
you see these meanings are different from those the words have now.

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