Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/129

the expression of thought are increased by attribution to the same word of different meanings. Not only does a term exchange one well-defined meaning for another, but it acquires new uses while yet retaining those it formerly possessed. For example, board appears to be originally connected with broad, and to designate etymologically that form of timber which is especially characterized by breadth rather than thickness. Here we have the customary and normal genesis of the name of a specific thing, by restriction of a general term expressing one of its attributes. Then follow yet other individualizations and transfers. The word is applied to designate a table: on the one hand, the table upon which our food is spread, and we sit around the festive board; whence, then, a metaphor makes it mean provision or entertainment; and we seek bed and board, or work for our board: on the other hand, the table about which a body of men sit for the transaction of business, and so, by another metaphor, those who sit about it, a constituted body of trustees or commissioners, the Board of Trade, or of Commerce, or of Admiralty. Again, it is specifically used to denote the plank covering of a vessel, and generates in this sense a new group of phrases, like aboard and overboard. The paper-maker, too, has his technical uses for the term; to him it signifies the stiffest and thickest, the most board-like, of his fabrics. Post (Latin positum, from pono, 'I place') means by derivation nothing more than 'put, placed, stationed'; all its varied and diverse senses—so diverse that we can not only say "as immovable as a post", but also "to travel post-haste"—we developed out of this, along with the historical growth of human institutions. The establishment of a series of stations, posts, for the trusty and rapid transmission of passengers and mails along a road, leads finally to the familiar use of such terms as post-coach, post-master, and postage. What a cluster of derived uses is gathered about the word head, as illustrated in the phrases the head of a pin, a head of cabbage, the head of a bed, the head of a household or of a sect, the head of a river, the heads of a discourse, a head of hair, so many head of sheep, of one's own head, to come to a head, to make head! Half the whole list of figures of rhetoric are exemplified in