oman law courts, where a 'praevaricator'
(properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and
loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one
who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by
his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the
opposite party; and, betraying the cause which he affects to support, so
manages the accusation as to obtain not the condemnation, but the
acquittal, of the accused; a "feint pleader", as, I think, in our old
law language he would have been termed. How much force would the keeping
of this in mind add to many passages in our elder divines.

Or take 'equivocal', 'equivocate', 'equivocation'. These words, which
belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so
doing have lost all the precision of their first employment.
'Equivocation' is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with
the intention of deceiving, as falls short of an actual lie; but
according to its etymology and in its primary use 'equivocation', this
fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the same name, of
things essentially diverse, hiding intentionally or otherwise a real
difference under a verbal resemblance{218}. Nor let it be urged in
defence of its present looser use, that only so could it have served the
needs of our ordinary conversation; on the contrary, had it retained its
first use, how serviceable an implement of thought would it have been in
detecting our own fallacies, or those of others; all which it can be now
no longer.

{Sidenote: '_Idea_'}

What now is 'idea' for us? How infinite the fall of this word since the
time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created
world,

"how it showed,
Answering his great _idea_",

to its present use when this person "has an _idea_ that the train has
started", and the other "had no _idea_ that the dinner would be so bad".
But this word 'idea' is perhaps the worst case in the English language.
Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom
Boswell tells us: "He was particularly indignant against the almost
universal use of the word _idea_ in the sense of _notion_ or _opinion_,
when it is clear that _idea_ can only signify something of which an
image can be formed in the mind". There is perhaps no word in the whole
compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness