An Odd Fixation on Words.

I fell to wondering today why writers of English tend to pair ‘small’ with ‘large’, and ‘little’ with ‘big.’ I came to the tentative conclusion that it’s all to do with a slight difference in nuance conveyed by the respective pairs of words. But that raised a second question: did the difference in nuance arise because of accepted usage, or did the usage develop because of the difference in nuance? Or is it something else entirely, such as the origin of the words?

And here’s something else that interests me:

We’re told that such-and-such an English word comes from an old source such as Latin (often through French), Greek, or Old Norse, but they rarely tell us where the Romans, Greeks, or Norwegians got it from. And even when they do give a comprehensive Indo-European lineage, they don’t tell us where the ancient nomads got it from. And that’s twice in two sentences that I’ve ended a sentence on a preposition, but the problem is that the alternative would probably have meant using ‘whence’, and that sounds a bit pretentious these days.

Does anybody else in the world care about such matters, or is it just me?