Description
Words are an adventure, words are fun. We cannot live without them. But what do we really know about them?
Over the years, the monthly issues of The Reader's Digest have contained, and still contain, a feature called IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER which was devised by the great lexicographer Wilfred Funk. This monthly feature is a test of twenty key words each followed by four possible meanings. The reader ticks the meanings he believes are nearest to the key words, and checks his opinions against the answers which are provided.
In many of these answers the derivations are given, and derivations can be exciting, for many words are alive with history. Do you know where the word 'canter' comes from? In an article in The Reader's Digest written by I. A. R. Wylie she quotes a friend who told her, Most of the pilgrims on their way to Thomas ร Becket's tomb at Canterbury travelled on horseback and, I suppose, got rather bored by their sedate progress. To have galloped would have been indecorous, but a sober intermediate gait broke the monotony. People along the roads began calling this easy lope the 'Canterbury pace' or 'gait', and in time this was shortened to 'the Canterbury'. About two hundred years later the word was shortened to canter. ISBN:WORDPOWER
