[…] children in different communities do learn every possible variety of names for the same thing […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.18

[…] words were assigned to their specific uses (so far as it is possible to trace their history) each at some definite time in the past, and for reasons which were satisfactory to the nomenclators, though they did not make the name either a definition or a description of the conception, and that the name, once given, formed a new and closer tie with the thing named than with its own etymological ancestor.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.77

The child finds out very soon that names do not in general belong to single objects alone, but rather to classes of related objects […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.27

These side or figurative uses of a word do not perplex us [...] they are part and parcel of the sphere of application of the word. For it is an important item in this process of transfer that we gradually lose our sense of the figure implied and come to employ each sign as if it had always been the simple and downright representative of its idea. Here we see the willingness […] which is essential to the prosperous development of a language, to forget the origin of a name when once it is won, to let drop the old associations and suggestions which belonged to it in virtue of its etymology, and invest it with a new set appertaining to its present use.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.87