New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page. How many nuances and therefore meanings attach to the multiple uses of the world “humanity”? In the cause of bringing his greatly revered faith to the English, Wycliffe not only widened the ecclesiastical vocabulary — “graven,” “Philistine,” “schism” — he also let loose words which over the next four centuries would net meanings far removed from the perilously translated texts of medieval
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