Of whole groups of
words, which may seem to acknowledge no kinship with one another, it
will not be difficult to show that they had the same parentage, or, if
not this, a cousinship in common. For instance, here are 'shore,'
'share,' 'shears'; 'shred,' 'sherd'; all most closely connected with
the verb 'to sheer.' 'Share' is a portion of anything divided off;
'shears' are instruments effecting this process of separation; the
'shore' is the place where the continuity of the land is interrupted by
the sea; a 'shred' is that which is shorn from the main piece; a
'sherd,' as a pot-'sherd,' (also 'pot-share,' Spenser,) that which is
broken off and thus divided from the vessel; these not all exhausting
this group or family of words, though it would occupy more time than we
can spare to put some other words in their relation with it.
But this analysing of groups of words for the detecting of the bond of
relationship between them, and their common root, may require more
etymological knowledge than you possess, and more helps from books than
you can always command. There is another process, and one which may
prove no less useful to yourselves and to others, which will lie more
certainly within your reach. You will meet in books, sometimes in the
same book, and perhaps in the same page of this book, a word used in
senses so far apart from one another that at first it will seem to you
absurd to suppose any bond of connexion between them. Now when you thus
fall in with a word employed in these two or more senses so far removed
from one another, accustom yourselves to seek out the bond which there
certainly is between these several uses.
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