Literature, a body of written works.

The name has traditionally been applied to those

imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the
perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. Literature may be classified according to a
variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject
matter.
For historical treatment of various literatures within geographical regions, see such articles
as African literature; African theatre; Oceanic literature; Western literature; Central Asian
arts; South Asian arts; and Southeast Asian arts. Some literatures are treated separately by
language, by nation, or by special subject (e.g., Arabic literature, Celtic literature, Latin
literature, French literature, Japanese literature, and biblical literature).
Definitions of the word literature tend to be circular. The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary considers literature to be “writings having excellence of form or
expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” The 19th-century
critic Walter Pater referred to “the matter of imaginative or artistic literature” as a “transcript, not
of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitely varied forms.” But such definitions assume that the
reader already knows what literature is. And indeed its central meaning, at least, is clear enough.
Deriving from the Latin littera, “a letter of the alphabet,” literature is first and foremost
humankind’s entire body of writing; after that it is the body of writing belonging to a given
language or people; then it is individual pieces of writing.
But already it is necessary to qualify these statements. To use the word writing when describing
literature is itself misleading, for one may speak of “oral literature” or “the literature of
preliterate peoples.” The art of literature is not reducible to the words on the page; they are there
solely because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature might be described as the organization
of words to give pleasure. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience
beyond “mere” pleasure. Literature also functions more broadly in society as a means of both
criticizing and affirming cultural values.

The Scope Of Literature

Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words even when
organized and written down is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily
informative technical, scholarly, journalistic would be excluded from the rank of literature by
most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as
belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if
they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit
is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the
contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at
all.
Etymology is the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed
over time. By extension, the term "the etymology of [a word]" means the origin of the particular
word.
HISTORICAL USAGE OF ETYMOLOGY
English ETYMOLOGY comes via Old French etimologie, ethimologie from
Latin etymologia (which Cicero spells in Greek letters and glosses as veriloquium, Latin for
“speaking the truth, conveying the truth”), a loan translation of the Greek etymología “analysis of
a word to discover its true meaning.” Etymología is a compound of the neuter noun étymon “true
meaning of a word according to its origin” (a neuter noun use of the adjective étymos “true”)
and -logía, a Greek combining form used in forming the names of sciences or bodies of
knowledge.
Ancient and medieval etymologies are mostly conjectures, puns, or folk etymologies, and are
generally wildly incorrect. Cicero, for instance, gives the etymology of Venus (stem Vener- ), the
goddess of love, as a derivation of the verb venīre “to come” because love and desire come to all.
The most famous etymological howler in Latin is Lūcus a nōn lūcendō “Grove from there being
no light,” a pun on lūcus “a clearing, grove” and lūcēre “to shine.” Lūcus a nōn lūcendō first
appears in a commentary on the Aeneid by Maurus Servius Honoratus, a grammarian of the late
4th and early 5th centuries.
Common English folk etymologies include cockroach for Spanish cucaracha and chaise
lounge for the correct chaise longue. In the case of cockroach, you have the unfamiliar Spanish
sounds assimilating with two near-sounding English
words, cock and roach. The longue in chaise longue means “long,” but to English readers, looks
very close in spelling to lounge, which is a logical use for a chair that is made for reclining on.
ETYMOLOGY in the sense “the linguistic science that investigates the origins of a word, its
relationships with words in other languages, and its historical development in form and meaning”
dates from the 1640s.