Shakespeare’s Ghost

One of the things I love about lesson-planning is that you end up going down insane wikipedia holes. Like, you start out with “crap, when was Napoleon born?” and then suddenly an hour later you’re reading about the invention of the refrigerator and you can’t remember how you got there. I LOVE WIKIPEDIA SO MUCH. I am so honored to live in the age of wikipedia. Even if it is extremely difficult to get your students to comprehend that if they just copy and paste an entire wikipedia article into a Word document, that does not constitute “writing a paper.” Alas.

So today, while lesson-planning for some good ol’ Euripides, I went to look up a date (for the record, that date was “480 B.C.”) and now it’s an hour later and i’ve just written down a huge list of words Shakespeare invented.

Everyone worth his salt knows that Bill S. invented roughly “a shit-ton” of words and phrases. Sometimes I get this dizzy feeling like everything that comes out of my mouth somehow originated in King Lear’s mouth or something (“worth his salt?” “dizzy?” “shit-ton?” etc.). But have you really examined the record of these words and phrases? It’s not just things like “my kingdom for a horse” or “who would bear the whips and scorns of time” or all those other things we always say in regular conversation to each other. For your pleasure, here is an extremely abridged list of shit the dude made up. It’s interesting because some of the words he invented out of whole cloth (oh god, is that phrase his too?), but others he invented by using nouns for adjectives, or vice versa, or adding prefixes to existing words, or mushing two existing words together. These are things we all do (I myself invented the word “encouragative,” which I demand be included in all free men’s lexicons at once), yet somehow his stuck, and the rest of ours have not stuck (yet).

And it’s crazy when you remember that he was all but forgotten for like 300 years–thought primarily a boorish, vulgar jerk who wished only to offend the delicate sensibilities of civilized men and denigrate royalty. Then in the Romantic Era all those rebellious long-haired crazy people like Victor Hugo and Gautier and Harriet Smithson were like “CHECK THIS SHIT OUT” and performing Hamlet in front of crowds composed half of booing/hissing “bald heads” and half of cartoonishly swooning 19 year old Romantic artists who were like “COULD YOU FUCKING BELIEVE WHEN BOTH ROMEO AND JULIET FUCKING DIED AT THE END OF THAT SHIT“. I mean, when Hamlet played in Paris, performed by a British company speaking English, Berlioz and Gautier and all those guys LOST THEIR SHIT, sobbing and flinging themselves around and writing about how they would never be the same and all literature is changed forevermore, forever, AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. That’s what kind of a splash Billy S. made in the Age of the Rise of the Individual’s Ghost. Suddenly Shakespeare was adopted as a symbol of the New Art, as an example of the amazing things you could do with drama and words. He provided a cool counter-force to all the boring 18th century plays where people just stood onstage and declaimed carefully-sculpted verse about how, like, women should stand up straight or whatever (exaggeration).

My point is that it’s only thanks to the nineteenth century that “Shakespeare” is a household word (his phrase!) today. Were it not for our friends the Romantics, we probably wouldn’t even know who he was. But so I want to know, when did these words enter the common vocabulary? Because people in the 18th century are using the word “accommodation,” I can tell you that. Did his words enter the language EVEN THOUGH his actual work wouldn’t become monumentally respected for 300 years? If so, WHY?!??? It would be like if we all were using 1700 brand-new words that were invented by the writer of “Weekend at Bernie’s.” (Maybe not quite that extreme)

I think a lot of it must have been that he was just writing down words that were already in use as slang. Like “bloody” or “bump” or whatever. Probably there were all these unofficial slang words–as there always are, amongst peoples–and he is just the first to write them down. So they were already becoming part of the lexicon. But he noted them with quill on paper! Which also is probably what contributed to him being considered vulgar for so long! Anybody who uses slang in literature is first considered kind of crazy and then later it’s like “ah the voice of their generation.” But so this helps explain the 300 years of calumny. Oh man, it’s all of a piece.

Anyway, check this shit out:

accommodation
aerial
amazement
assassination
auspicious
baseless
bloody (?!)
bump
castigate
countless
courtship
critic
critical
dishearten
dwindle
exposure
fitful
frugal
generous
gloomy
gnarled
hurry
impartial
inauspicious
indistinguishable
lapse
laughable
lonely
majestic
misplaced
monumental
obscene
perusal
pious
premeditated
radiance
reliance
road (?!?!?!!)
sanctimonious
submerge
suspicious
all that glitters isn’t gold
be all and end all
to break the ice
to breathe one’s last
brevity being the soul of wit
to catch a cold
every dog will have his day
eat out of house and home
elbow room
fair play
fancy-free
it’s Greek to me
live long day
method to his madness
mind’s eye
naked truth
one fell swoop
pitched battle
strange bedfellows
milk of human kindness
to thine own self be true
too much of a good thing
wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve
the noun “eyeball” (!?!!!!)
puking (!)
skim milk (!!)
hot-blooded
the game is afoot (!! Sherlock Holmes is QUOTING SHAKESPEARE!)
epileptic
wormhole (!!!! he just means “rot” but still!)
alligator (!?)
household word
seen better days
full circle
a sorry sight
laughing stock
IN A PICKLE

This is only a few of them, too! Holy crap.

The less said the better, I guess. Also never forget, “wherefore” means “why” not “where.”

Now back to Euripides. BORING!