Mr Matthew Newcomen was a clergyman who died in 1669. At his funeral he was described as “a solid, painful, pathetic, and perswaisive preacher”. While nobody today would want to be called a “painful and pathetic” speaker, to Newcomen it would have been high praise. “Pathetic’, from the Greek πάθος which means happening, experience, or suffering, meant of deep feeling in the seventeenth century. Likewise, “painful” had a meaning closer to “painstaking” in modern English.