I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it at his club. It had a very enjoyable review by Sir Brian Vickers of the Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson. I understood much of it and agreed with most. A point I applauded was the need to annotate not only rare words but also deceptively simple words with a different meaning in Jonson’s day. They include ill, perfect, action, subtlety, free and accident. So, when Thomas More wrote of the ‘sottle suggestion of vice’, he did not mean a fine-tuned or even imperceptible suggestion, but one that was deceitful. Since Jonson named one of his characters Subtle, it is an important word to understand aright.
We still see such dangerous ambiguity today, with words in transit between meanings.
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