The word _world_ has
had almost the opposite history to the word _house_. World originally
applied only to persons and not to any place. It meant a "generation
of men," and then came to mean men and the earth they live on, and
then the earth itself; until it has a quite general sense, as when we
speak of "other worlds than ours."

Many words which are used at present to describe bad or disagreeable
things were used quite differently originally. The word _villain_ is,
perhaps, the most expressive we can use to show our opinion of the
depths of a person's wickedness. Yet in the Middle Ages a villain, or
"villein," was merely a serf or labourer bound to work on the land of
a particular lord. The word in Saxon times would have been _churl_. As
time went on both these words became terms of contempt. The lords in
the Middle Ages were certainly often more wicked than the serfs, as we
see in the stories of the days of Robin Hood; but by degrees the
people of the higher classes began to use the word _villain_ more and
more contemptuously. Many of them imagined that only people of their
own class were capable of high thoughts and noble conduct. Gradually
"villainy" came to mean all that was low and vulgar, and by degrees it
came to have the meaning it has now of "sheer wickedness." At the end
of the Middle Ages there were practically no longer any serfs in
England; but the word _villain_ has remained in this new sense, and
gives us a complete story of the misunderstanding and dislike which
must have existed between "noble" and "simple" to cause such a change
in the meaning of the word.

The word _churl_ has a somewhat similar history. We say now that a
sulky, ungracious person is a "mere churl," or behaves in a "churlish"
manner, never thinking of the original meaning of the word. Here,
again, is a little story of injustice. The present use of the word
comes from the supposition that only the mere labourer could behave in
a sulky or bad-tempered way.

_Knave_ is another of those words which originally described persons
of poor condition and have now come to mean a wicked or deceitful
person. A knave, as we now understand the word, means a person who
cheats in a particularly mean way, but formerly the word meant merely
"boy." It then came to mean "servant," just as the word _garcon_
("boy") is used for all waiters in French restaurants. Another word
which now means, as a rule, some one unutterably wicked, is _wretch_,
though i