{267} [The direct opposite is the fact. The French _contredanse_ was borrowed from the English ‘country-dance’. See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 153.] {268} [These words are not identical. They were in use as distinct words in the fifteenth century. See N.E.D.] {269} [Dr. Murray has shown that ‘causeway’ is not a corruption of ‘causey’ but a compound of that word with ‘way’.] {270} [Prof. Skeat has demonstrated that the supposed Greek ‘rachitis’, inflammation of the back, is an ætiological invention to serve as etymon of ‘rickets’, the condition of being rickety, a purely native word. See also _Folk-Etymology_, 312.] {271} [See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 124.] {272} _Phars._ vi. 720-830. {273} Thus in a _Vocabulary_, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio facta _per nigros_. {274} [Dyce believed that it was really thus derived and distinct from _pleurisy_, but it was evidently modelled upon that word (_Remarks on Editions of Shakespeare_, p. 218).] {275} As ‘orthography’ itself means properly “_right_ spelling”, it might be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an _incorrect_ _ortho_graphy, that is of a _wrong_ _right_-spelling. The question which would be thus started is one of not unfrequent recurrence, and it is very worthy of observation how often, so soon as we take note of etymologies, this _contradictio in adjecto_ is found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples from the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own tongue. Thus the Greeks having no convenient word to express a rider, apart from a rider _on a horse_, did not scruple to speak of the _horse_man (ἱππεύς) upon an _elephant_. They often allowed themselves in a like inaccuracy, where certainly there was no necessity; as in using ἀνδριάς of the statue of a _woman_; where it would have been quite as easy to have used εἱκών or ἄγαλμα. So too their ‘table’ (τράπεζα = τετράπεζα) involved probably the _four_ feet which commonly support one; yet they did not shrink from speaking of a _three_-footed table (τρίπους τράπεζα), in other words, a “_three_-footed _four_-footed”; much as though we should speak of a “_three_-footed _quadru_ped”. Homer writes of a ‘hecatomb’ not of a _hundred_, but of twelve, oxen; and elsewhere of Hebe he says, in words not reproducible in English, νέκταρ ἐωνοχόει. ‘Tetrarchs’ were often rulers of quite other than _fourth_ parts of a land. Ἀκρατος had so come to stand for wine, without any thought more of its signifying originally the _unmingled_, that St. John speaks of ἄκρατος κεκερασμένος (Rev. xiv. 10), or the unmingled mingled. Boxes in which precious ointments were contained were so commonly of alabaster, that the name came to be applied to them whether they were so or not; and