Re: Word connections - malaise and sit

At 12:51 am -0400 25/5/01, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Nathan Roy wrote:
>> A truly happy person is simply unaware of all the misfortune that currently
>> plagues human existance!
>
>With "silly", the progression was apparently:
>happy -> blessed -> innocent -> naive -> foolish
Tho the original meaning was known to me when I was a young, innocent,
naive kid  :)

I was born and bred in Sussex which has the trditional epithet "silly" (I
believe Suffolk also claims this) - but it was often explained to me that
"Silly Sussex" meant "Blessed Sussex".

And why was it blessed?  Because it was the original garden of Eden and the
devil had once tried to destroy it by digging through the South Downs so
that the sea would flood the Sussex weald.  He was thwarted in his attempt
by St Dunstan.  The proof of this is the remains of the channel cut out of
the Downs by the devil near Brighton called to this very day "Devil's Dike"
;)

>With "nice", the meaning changed dozens of times over a few decades,
>apparently something like:
>Foolish -> shy -> fastidious -> refined -> pleasant
Somewhere along the line it also aquired the meaning "precice, exact",
which was still extant in ordinary speech in the first half of the 20th
cent.   My grandfather used the word with that meaning.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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