It would be naïve to believe that Haydn did not know what he was doing — the same Haydn who wrote on the margin of a contrapuntal passage in one of his manuscripts: ‘This is for all-too-learnèd ears.’ Haydn’s originality lay in his artistic intelligence and in his courage.
1964: Sezione Germanica, Annali, p113
Much of Woodhouse’s verbal humor involves play with lexical items and their semantic fields. He often uses terms out of their normal contexts, especially learnèd terms in non-learnèd environments, as when he says of Sir Aylmer Bostock (Uncle Dynamite, ch. 6): “Plainly, he was unwilling to relinquish his memories of a…
2014: Martin Maiden, A Linguistic History of Italian
Much of the learnèd vocabulary of Italian, i.e., words introduced into the language by an educated elite, is of Latin origin (Classical Greek is another major source)…
