[Lexicog] Shakespeare and words

Tue Sep 23 23:06:33 UTC 2014

Shakespeare's influence on English phraseology may be great, but even greater is that of William Tyndale, the Bible translator, who probably has had more influence on modern English usage than any other writer. Quotation dictionaries tend to ignore Tyndale and cite his contributions simply under "Bible" or the like.

Ken Hill

>________________________________
> From: "Hayim Sheynin hayim.sheynin at gmail.com [lexicographylist]" <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
>To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
>Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2014 2:21 PM
>Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Shakespeare and words
> 
>
>
>  
>Dear Fritz,
>
>
>Thank you for forwarding the article about Bard. This article is very interesting. I can
>mention that in many national literatures appeared such outstanding personalities  as
>Shakespeare and Bard who influenced the language and phraseology. Usually
>they appeared in the period of formation of national languages. For Germans such
>role played most probably M. Luther (in his Bible translation) and Goethe, for Italians 
>Dante, for Russians Karamzin, Pushkin and Griboedov, for Jews (i.e. for Hebrew
>language) - original Hebrew Bible and Ch. N. Bialik, for Yiddish Mendele Moycher
>Sforim (Sh. Abramowich) and Shalom Aleychem (Sh. Rabinowich).
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>
>Best wishes,
>
>
>Hayim Sheynin
>
>
>On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 12:26 PM, 'Dr. Fritz Goerling' fritz.goerling at yahoo.de [lexicographylist] <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
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>>  
>> 
>>I thought this would interest you. 
>> 
>>Fritz Goerling
>> 
>>a man of fire-new 
words
>>Celebrating the Bard’s 450th 
birthday
>>by Richard 
Lederer
>> 
>>On April 23, we will celebrate the 450th birthday 
of the greatest word-maker who ever trod the earthly stage. Of the 20,138 
basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, sonnets, and other poems, his 
is the first known use of over 1,700 of them! The most verbally innovative of 
our authors, Shakespeare made up more than 8.5percent of his written 
vocabulary. Reading his works is like witnessing the birth of modern 
English.
>>Among his verbal inventions arc: auspicious, bedroom, 
bump, dishearten, dwindle, hurry, lapse, lonely, majestic, road, sneak, and useless. So great is his influence on his native tongue that we find it 
hard to imagine a time when these words did not exist:
>>Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Now we sit through 
Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.” Unrivaled in so many other 
ways in matters verbal, Shakespeare is unequaled as a 
phrasemaker.
>>A student who attended a performance of “Hamlet” came 
away complaining that the play “was nothing more than a bunch of clichés.” The 
reason for this common reaction is that so many of the memorable expressions in 
“Hamlet” have become proverbial. In that one play alone were born: brevity is 
the soul of wit; there’s the rub; to thine own self be true; it smells to 
heaven; the very witching time of night; the primrose path; though this be 
madness, yet there is method in it; dog will have his day; the apparel oft 
proclaims the man; neither a borrower nor a lender be; frailty, thy name is 
woman; something is rotten in the state of Denmark; more honored in the breach 
than the observance; hoist with his own petard; the lady doth protest too much;  to be or not to be; sweets for the sweet; the be-all and end-all; to the manner 
born, and, more in sorrow than in anger.
>>Cudgel your brain, and you can append a sample of 
everyday, idiomatic phrases from other Shakespearean plays: if you knit your 
brow and wish that this disquisition would vanish into thin air because it is 
Greek to you, you are quoting William Shakespeare in all his infinite variety. 
If you point the finger at strange bedfellows and blinking -idiots, you are 
converting Shakespeare’s coinages into currency. If you have seen better days in 
your salad days, when you wore your heart on your sleeve, you are, whether you 
know it or not, going from Bard to verse.
>>If you break the ice with one fell swoop, if you never 
stand on ceremonies, if you play it fast and loose until the crack of doom, if 
you paint the lily, if you hope for a plague on both houses, if you are more 
sinned against than sinning because you have all been eaten out of house and 
home by your own flesh and blood (the most unkindest cut of all), if you haven’t 
slept a wink and are breathing your last because you’re in a pickle, if you 
carry within you the milk of human kindness and a heart of gold (even though you  know that all that glisters is not gold), if you laugh yourself into stitches at 
too much of a good thing, if you make a virtue of necessity, if you know that 
the course of true love never did run smooth, and if you won’t budge an 
inch—why, if the truth be told and the truth will out, what the dickens, in a 
word, right on!, be that as it may, the game is up — you are, as luck would have 
it, standing on that tower of strength of phrasemakers, William 
Shakespeare.
>>The etymologist Ernest Weekley said of Shakespeare, “His 
contribution to our phraseology is ten times greater than that of any writer to 
any language in the history of the world.” The essayist and novelist Walter 
Pater exclaimed, “What a garden of words!” In Sonnet CXVI, the Bard himself 
wrote, “If this be error and upon me proved,/I never writ, nor no man ever 
loved.” If Shakespeare had not lived and written with such a loving ear for the 
music of our language, our English tongue would be immeasurably the poorer. No 
day goes by that we do not speak and hear and read and write his 
legacy.
>>(Reprinted from Mensa Bulletin, April/May 2014, ed. Roger 
Brooks)
>> 
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