Generous Generosity
Generous Generosity
Generous is an adjective frequently adopted by poets; generosity is a virtue greatly valued by nobilities; generous generosity is a depiction historically inherited by generations. I am always wondering that how does ‘generosity’ develop its personal charisma to attract so much attention? Is it possible to decode its mystery by tracing the origin of ‘generous’? Browsing through books, I discovered that some clues keep emerging.
From a historic perspective, tracing word’s development back in time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items were formerly identical words. The deep prehistory of language has nurtured little word-seeds that over the millennia have proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary. ‘Generous’ is a word of no exception. Originally, it was a derivative of genus in the sense “birth, stock, race,” and harks back semantically to its ultimate source in the Indo-European base ‘gen’ denoting ‘produce’. Its Germanic offshoots include kin, kind, and probably king, but for sheer numbers it is the Latin descendant genus “race, type”. It probably entered the language in the 16th century coming via Old French genereux from Latin generosus, which originally meant “of noble birth” (a sense which survived in English into the late 17th century – Richard Knolles, for instance, in his General history of the Turks 1603, wrote of “many knights of generous extraction’). Years of evolution witness the moderate changes in the meaning of “generous”, and its semantic progression from ‘nobly born’ through ‘noble-minded, magnanimous’ to ‘liberal in giving’ impresses me while reading classics.
In the field of literature, ‘generous’ enjoys a great rate of exposure. Let alone other authors, solely William Shakespeare used it for at least dozen times. Its first appearance was in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a work of Shakespeare’s early comedy. For instance, in scene one the fifth Act，a humorous dialogue conducted
Generous is an adjective frequently adopted by poets; generosity is a virtue greatly valued by nobilities; generous generosity is a depiction historically inherited by generations. I am always wondering that how does ‘generosity’ develop its personal charisma to attract so much attention? Is it possible to decode its mystery by tracing the origin of ‘generous’? Browsing through books, I discovered that some clues keep emerging.
From a historic perspective, tracing word’s development back in time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items were formerly identical words. The deep prehistory of language has nurtured little word-seeds that over the millennia have proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary. ‘Generous’ is a word of no exception. Originally, it was a derivative of genus in the sense “birth, stock, race,” and harks back semantically to its ultimate source in the Indo-European base ‘gen’ denoting ‘produce’. Its Germanic offshoots include kin, kind, and probably king, but for sheer numbers it is the Latin descendant genus “race, type”. It probably entered the language in the 16th century coming via Old French genereux from Latin generosus, which originally meant “of noble birth” (a sense which survived in English into the late 17th century – Richard Knolles, for instance, in his General history of the Turks 1603, wrote of “many knights of generous extraction’). Years of evolution witness the moderate changes in the meaning of “generous”, and its semantic progression from ‘nobly born’ through ‘noble-minded, magnanimous’ to ‘liberal in giving’ impresses me while reading classics.
In the field of literature, ‘generous’ enjoys a great rate of exposure. Let alone other authors, solely William Shakespeare used it for at least dozen times. Its first appearance was in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a work of Shakespeare’s early comedy. For instance, in scene one the fifth Act，a humorous dialogue conducted
Cited: 1. Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, Edited by T.F.HOAD 2000, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press 2. Shakespeare 's vocabulary study of 110 cases, Edited by Yang Junfeng 2007, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press 3. http://www.quoteland.com/generous