Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    chase) and that she merged her individuality in that of her husband’s family, disproving the matriarchal theory as ap¬ plied to the Aryans—indeed the wife was almost a chattel. Time was measured, the month by nights, and the year by lunar months; the hardships of winter and of night were deeply impressed upon the imagination, a glimpse of which is given in our own words fortnight and sennight. Where they lived, what was their religion, how they migrated and fathered us, these and many such things are also intimated in the word-stems they have handed down to us. Taking our words as we find them and going back step by step in their history, we learn that like the spirit which begets them they are constantly undergoing change. A new subtle meaning is always being put into them and they lose their old significances with a silent and secret elusiveness. When we collate them after a century or two they are like antiquated photographs, and from still farther dates and countries they are strangely exotic. Psychic revolutions and social histories are thus focussed in them. There are, for example, words now applied only to women which were once predicated of both men and women. This can signify only that women monopolized the qualities thereby expressed, and that the men un¬ learned them, so that they became ludicrous as male char¬ acteristics. How much longer we may call a man a flirt is a question. The word is evidently going the way of Coquet, which was once as much a male as a female virtue. Women will find it difficult to prove, at least etymologic¬ ally, that they have not trifled with love more than men have. Hag was once applied to men also. It perhaps tells a sad tale of the cruelty to old women, who were forced out of the town, lived in the bushes, became more hated by their methods of “ getting even,” their superstitions, and those of their cruel fellows. Witch. Piers Ploughman, and even Beaumont and Fletcher, still applied this word to men, but women evidently monopo-
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