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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: speak; the French Academie, in its modesty, having omitted to supply a
definition out of regard for the age of its forty members. Whenever a
new word comes to supply the place of an unwieldy circumlocution, its
fortune is assured; the word /lorette/ has passed into the language of
every class of society, even where the lorette herself will never gain
an entrance. It was only invented in 1840, and derived beyond a doubt
from the agglomeration of such swallows' nests about the Church of Our
Lady of Loretto. This information is for etymoligists only. Those
gentlemen would not be so often in a quandary if mediaeval writers had
only taken such pains with details of contemporary manners as we take
in these days of analysis and description.
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