[37]
But we may pardon anyone
after the example set by Varro.1 For he tried to
persuade Cicero, to whom he dedicated his work,
that a field was called eager because something is
done in it (agitur), and jackdaws graculos because
they fly in flocks (gregatim), in spite of the obvious
fact that the first word is derived from the Greek,
the latter from the cry of the bird in question.
1 de Lingua Lat. v. 34 and 76.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.