with the unity of the Godhead.  Words betokening future happenings or involving judgment tend to take a special cast from the fears and anxieties men feel when their fortune is affected or their destiny controlled by external forces.  Thus omen (a prophetic utterance or sign) and portent (a stretching forward, a foreseeing, a foretelling) might originally be either benign or baleful; but nowadays, especially in the adjectival forms ominous and portentous, they wear a menacing hue.  Similarly criticism, censure, and doom, all of them signifying at first mere judgment, have come—­the first in popular, the other two in universal, usage—­to stand for adverse judgment.  The old sense of doom is perpetuated, however, in Doomsday, which means the day on which we are all to be, not necessarily sent to hell, but judged.

You will furthermore perceive that the exaggerated affirmations people are always indulging in have led to the weakening of many a word. Fret meant eat; formerly to say that a man was fretting was to use a vigorous comparison—­to have the man devoured with care. Mortify meant to kill, then killed with embarrassment, then embarrassed. Qualm meant death, but our qualms of conscience have degenerated into mere twinges.  Oaths are shorn of their might by overuse; confound, once a tremendous malinvocation, may now fall from the lips of respectable young ladies, and fie, in its time not a whit less dire, would be scarcely out of place in even a cloister.  Words designating immediacy come to have no more strength than soup-meat seven times boiled. Presently meant in the present, soon and by and by meant forthwith.  How they have lost their fundamental meaning will be intelligible to you if you have in ordering something been told that it would be delivered “right away,” or in calling for a girl have been told that she would be down “in a minute.”

You will detect in words of another class a deterioration, not in force, but in character; they have fallen into contemptuous or sinister usage.  Many words for skill or wisdom have been thus debased. Cunning meant knowing, artful meant well acquainted with one’s art, crafty meant proficient in one’s craft or calling, wizard meant wise man.  The present import of these words shows how men have assumed that mental superiority must be yoked with moral dereliction or diabolical aid.  Words indicating the generality—­indicating ordinary rank or popular affiliations—­have in many instances suffered the same decline. Trivial meant three ways; it was what might be heard at the crossroads or on any route you chanced to be traveling, and its value was accordingly slight. Lewd meant belonging to the laity; it came to mean ignorant, and then morally reprehensible. Common may be used to signify ill-bred; vulgar may be and