Crossword-Solution: AORIST 6 letters, 9 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 6

Strange as it may appear at first sight, it has a deep foundation in the grammatical sentiment, if I may say so, of the Arabic language, which always ascribed a more or less nominal character to the aorist.

The less surprising, therefore, can it be to find that the use of a preposition in connection with it has so largely increased in the modern idiom, where it serves to mark this semi-nominal character of the aorist, which otherwise would be lost in consequence of the loss of the vowel terminations.

Bouncer's case, but in many others, also, of a like nature, gentlemen who have been plucked can always attribute their totally-unexpected failures to a Second Aorist, or a something equivalent to "the salmon," or "the melted butter," or "that glass of sherry," which are recognized as the causes for so many morning reflections.

Aorist, indeed! Primus or Secundus, what mattered it? Paving stones were something, brickbats were something; but an old superannuated tense! That any grown man should trouble himself about _that!_ Indeed there _was_ something extraordinary there.

Here is an instance of its use in Greek, taken from the well-known night scene in the "Iliad:"-- ------_gaethaese de poimenos aetor_, And the heart of the shepherd _rejoices_; where the verb _gaethaese_ is in the indefinite or aorist tense, and is meant to indicate a condition of feeling not limited to any time whatever--past, present, or future.