of distinction”; and so, when any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words. One of the earliest recorded examples of such a shift is analysed with sharp penetration by Thucydides in his account of the demoralization of the Greek States during the Peloponnesian War: Proper shame [he says] is now termed sheer stupidity: shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness: voluptuousness passes for good tone: haughtiness for good education: lawlessness for freedom: honourable dealing is dubbed hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune. Similar, but less conspicuous and rapid, alterations of mood must have been at work when _silly_ lost its old meaning of ‘blessed’; when _demure_ changed from ‘grave’ or ‘sober’ to ‘affectedly modest’; and when the kindly _officious_ acquired its modern sense of bustling interference. Trench regards it as a tribute to the Roman character that theirs is the only civilized language in which the word for ‘simple’ never acquired a contemptuous signification alongside of its ordinary one. And at the opposite pole from Thucydides we have another Aryan historian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, good-humouredly suggesting what might be called a semantic method of slipping off a Semitic incubus: As for sin, let us call it folly and have done with it, for until we call it folly we never shall have done with it. The conception of sin flatters us grossly. There is something grandiose in it that cannot but appeal to the child in every man. That we infinitesimal creatures, scrambling like ants over the face of this minor planet in pursuit of our personal aims—that we have it in our power to affront the majesty of the universe is a most preposterous, delightful fancy.... It may be remarked in passing that there is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man’s character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words. Each of us would no doubt choose his own list of test words—and the lists themselves, if we were foolish enough to reveal them, would probably present a fairly accurate diagram of our own leading propensities. Fortunately the subject is too long to elaborate. _Ogle_ is another new word which appeared soon after the Restoration; and at the same time _intrigue_, which had come into the language earlier in the century in the general sense of ‘intricacy’, was seized upon to express an illicit love-affair. The steady growth of “polite” society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is also—curiously enough—indicated by the gradual appearance of _bearish_, _countrified_, _fatuous_, _flippant_, _gawky_, _mawkish_, _prude_, and other such terms. _Hoyden_ was first used of a girl by Wycherley in 1676.