frequently is used to signify indecent. Sabotage, from a French term meaning wooden shoe, has come to be applied to the deliberate and systematic scamping of one’s work in order to injure one’s employer. Idiot (common soldier) crystallizes the exasperated ill opinion of officers for privates. (Infantry—­an organization of military infants—­has on the contrary sloughed its reproach and now enshrines the dignity of lowliness.) Somewhat akin to words of this type is knave, which first meant boy, then servant, then rogue.  Terms for agricultural classes seldom remain flattering.  Besides such epithets as hayseed and clodhopper, contemptuous in their very origin, villain (farm servant), churl (farm laborer), and boor (peasant) have all gathered unto themselves opprobrium; villain now involves a scoundrelly spirit, churl a contumelious manner, boor a bumptious ill-breeding; not one of these words is any longer confined in its application to a particular social rank.  Terms for womankind are soon tainted. Wench meant at first nothing worse than girl or daughter, quean than woman, hussy than housewife; even woman is generally felt to be half-slighting.  Terms affirming unacquaintance with sin, or abstention from it, tend to be quickly reft of what praise they are fraught with; none of us likes to be saluted as innocent, guileless, or unsophisticated, and to be dubbed silly no longer makes us feel blessed.  Besides these and similar classes of words, there are innumerable individual terms that have sadly lost caste.  An imp was erstwhile a scion; it then became a boy, and then a mischievous spirit.  A noise might once be music; it has ceased to enjoy such possibilities.  To live near a piano that is constantly banged is to know how noise as a synonym for music was outlawed.

A backward glance over the history of words repays you in showing you the words for what they are, and in having them live out their lives before you.  Do you know what an umpire is?  He is a non (or num) peer, a not equal man, an odd man—­one therefore who can decide disputes.  Do you know what a nickname is?  It is an eke (also) name, a title bestowed upon one in addition to his proper designation.  Do you know what a fellow, etymologically speaking, is?  He is a fee-layer, a partner, a man who lays his fee (property) alongside yours.  Do you know that matinee, though awarded to the afternoon, meant primarily a morning entertainment and has traveled so far from its original sense that we call an actual before-noon performance a morning matinee?  Do you know the past of such words as bedlam, rival, parson, sandwich, pocket handkerchief? Bedlam, a corruption of Bethlehem, was a hospital for the insane in London; it came to be a general term for great confusion or discord. Rivals were