Ice Tea and Semantic Drift
Word Matters
00:00
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The word ancient means former or it did in the 18th century when the group was founded. I looked up Abraham Lincoln's correspondence and sure enough he uses the word wonderful only in one sense, which is the astonishing sense. 1899 is the year in which a book was published called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It shows that that word has changed meaning only recently. And to think that there's a parallel word in English, wondrous,. Which continues to mean as it has always evocative of wonder, that evokes wonder.
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