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Is there a similar figure for the French language? It has always struck me that French literature, unlike English or German or Italian or Russian or Spanish, does not have a single dominant writer.<br>
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Fred Shapiro<br>
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<div style="direction: ltr;" id="divRpF683944"><font size="2" color="#000000" face="Tahoma"><b>From:</b> lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com [lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Tuesday, September 23, 2014 5:21 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [Lexicog] Shakespeare and words<br>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Dear Fritz,</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Thank you for forwarding the article about Bard. This article is very interesting. I can</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">mention that in many national literatures appeared such outstanding personalities as</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Shakespeare and Bard who influenced the language and phraseology. Usually</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">they appeared in the period of formation of national languages. For Germans such</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">role played most probably M. Luther (in his Bible translation) and Goethe, for Italians </div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Dante, for Russians Karamzin, Pushkin and Griboedov, for Jews (i.e. for Hebrew</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">language) - original Hebrew Bible and Ch. N. Bialik, for Yiddish Mendele Moycher</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Sforim (Sh. Abramowich) and Shalom Aleychem (Sh. Rabinowich).</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Best wishes,</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-size: large;">Hayim Sheynin</div>
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<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 12:26 PM, 'Dr. Fritz Goerling' <a href="mailto:fritz.goerling@yahoo.de" target="_blank">
fritz.goerling@yahoo.de</a> [lexicographylist] <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com" target="_blank">lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div><font face="Calibri">I thought </font>this would interest you. </div>
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<div><font face="Calibri">Fritz Goerling</font></div>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">a man of fire-new words<u></u><u></u></span></b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Celebrating the Bard’s 450th birthday<u></u><u></u></span></i></b></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">by Richard Lederer<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><u></u> <u></u></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">On April 23, we will celebrate the
<i>450th </i>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 8.5<i> </i>percent of his written vocabulary. Reading his works is like witnessing the birth of modern English.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Among his verbal inventions arc:
<i>auspicious, bedroom, bump, dishearten, dwindle, hurry, lapse, lonely, majestic, road, sneak,
</i>and <i>useless. </i>So great is his influence on his native tongue that we find it hard to imagine a time when these words did not exist:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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:
<i>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, </i>and, <i>more in sorrow than in anger.<u></u><u></u></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(Reprinted from
</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Mensa Bulletin, <i>April/May 2014, ed. Roger Brooks)<u></u><u></u></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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