I am currently writing a series about Shakespeare. He drove me crazy at school, so there’s a certain irony to this.
Back then, when I was in my green blazer, it was like someone in 2414 studying the history of hip hop. Yeah, so Jay-Z and someone shot some do-nothing called Tupac.
So where’s the relevance to my life?
Generations of schoolkids hate him, but once Shakespeare was cool. A little known fact: he added around 1500 words and phrases to the English language.
As the average vocabulary has been estimated at around 50,000 words, to have one man, now long dead, accounting for 3% of every word you currently know and understand - well, that’s not bad.
It seems that when he was stuck for a word, Will didn’t reach for the thesaurus - there wasn’t one - so he made up his own.
It was like rap, without all the motherfucking swearing. Back in the day, it was so cool to quote Shakespeare that the words slipped into the language as easy as phat, jiggy, bling and twerking
But instead of coming from different sources they came from just one man.
It was like Tarantino alone being responsible for mankini, muffin top, OMG, woot and sexting.
Shakespeare pioneered the art of adding prefixes to common words to make completely new ones: archvillain (Timon of Athens), dishearten (King Henry V), and uncomfortable (Romeo and Juliet), along with inaudible, indistinguishable, and inauspicious.
He was also first with this: “Madam, undress you and come now to bed.” - The Taming of the Shrew
Now there’s a prefix no guy should be without.
Or he’d add a suffix: men had only been courting women for twenty years before The Merchant of Venice when Shakespeare gave it a name - courtship.
He made new adjectives like ‘gloomy’ (Titus Andronicus) from the verb ‘to gloom.’ We don’t gloom anymore but Shakespeare’s word has survived.
Or there’s ‘laughable’ (The Merchant of Venice) from the verb ‘to laugh'; ‘majestic’ (The Tempest) from ‘majesty’ and ‘lonely’ (Coriolanus) - until Shakespeare people had only ever been alone.
Shakespeare had Latin beaten into him at school, and he used his hard won knowledge to make new words like ‘radiance’, (from radiantem meaning ‘beaming’ - King Lear); ‘generous’ (from generosus meaning ‘of noble birth’ - first used in Hamlet); frugal (from frugi meaning ‘worthy, honest’ in Much Ado About Nothing) and ‘critical’ (from the Latin ‘criticus’ which referred to a literary critic - in Othello.)
He also plundered Dutch to create the word ‘rant’ (from the Dutch ‘randten’ meaning ‘to talk foolishly’) - ‘I’ll rant as well as thou,’ in Hamlet.
And he used his knowledge of Italian to invent the word ‘zany’ ( from the Italian ‘zani’ which came from ‘Zanni,’ a version of the name Giovanni).
‘Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany’ - Love’s Labour’s Lost
His unsurpassed powers of imagery gave us ‘hot-blooded’, (King Lear) and cold-blooded, (King John) as well as ‘barefaced,’ ‘baseless’ and ‘watchdog’.
And none of us hopeless romantics could wear ‘our hearts on our sleeves’ until Iago articulated it in Othello in 1604.
Some other words you might not know originated with Shakespeare:
Alligator
Auspicious
Bedazzled
Belongings
Castigate
Dwindle
Epileptic
Eyeball
Hurry
Multitudinous
Sanctimonious
It’s an extraordinary contribution; but no, contrary to popular belief, he didn’t invent the word: to google.
That was Francis Bacon.
Don’t miss a post! You can subscribe to my blog at the top of the page.
Even better, make sure you’re on the mailing list for my newsletter!
Just for joining, I’ll send you a copy of my best selling eBook, ‘OPIUM’ !
Every month I give away free books and let you know about new releases and new offers.
TO SUBSCRIBE, JUST CLICK HERE!
Thanks for Rowan Atkinson and the lulz! My parents and I were (and are) avid “MacBeth” fans. I used to read it about once a year, and my father and I would sling quotes from the play back and forth. It’s a Scottish thing. My mother, who had some fey idea that she was going to be in ‘amateur theatre’ stopped reading it and we weren’t allowed to mention it, when she had one of her productions going. What she was really doing was the Olde Mellerdrammer out at a joint called “the Opry House” in a place called New Almaden. The audience drank beer, ate peanuts and participated in the shows, so it wasn’t really professional, but it was a hell of a lot of fun! Shakespeare has always ruled, and even though I may have not been reading him, I (through my mom again, who did teach English) knew that his was a large and potent influence on the Mother tongue, no matter which side of the pond! I loved the comparison with J-Z and Tupac! Keepin’ it real! Thanks, Colin! You rock!
Thank you! And the audience drinking beer, eating peanuts and participating is very much in the Shakespeare tradition! Were there any women selling themselves in the back row?
If not in the back row, there was plenty of action going on out in the parking lot, in cars, between acts! Thanks for making my day!