

Shakespeare's Vocabulary Considered Unexceptional - zwischenzug
http://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_unexceptional_vocabulary/

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barrkel
There's more power in putting together a handful of common words in a powerful
image or metaphor than a particularly apt selection of a single word, for
several reasons.

Overuse of obscure words will reduce the size of your potential audience;
Shakespeare wrote plays that were seen by a broad slice of the population and
have humour and puns to match. It wouldn't have made sense for him to dig too
far in this direction. Original words, meanwhile, are frequently formed by
joining together two other words. Joyce was especially fond of this.

A vocabulary wielded almost like a weapon has far more value as a social
signifier. Uncommon words are especially potent if they're capable of sending
an adversarial interlocutor to the dictionary, because in the heat of the
moment your opponent is left with only two choices: concede a point, or look
stupid or uneducated asking what you meant.

Particularly precise words are also subject to some of the same problems that
Orwell enumerates in Politics and the English Language [1]: lazy prefabricated
sentence fragments that waffle around the proper thrust of the desired
meaning. His essay is a strong affirmation of the value of plain English,
suggesting effort be applied to original metaphor, simile and imagery instead.

[1] <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm>

~~~
zwischenzug
I believe Shakespeare was considered wordy and difficult by his "broad"
audience. But he knew how to hit the crowd's buttons and was considered
populist by the literary elite of his day. And the myth of his large
vocabulary continues.

Looking through the list of unique words used by Joyce, surprisingly few of
them looked invented to me.

~~~
barrkel
Joyce loved making up words by joining them together. It almost seemed like he
was making a kind of bid for immortality by throwing as much stuff at the wall
and seeing what would stick. It's one of the most obvious characteristics of
his writing; that you doubt this makes me wonder if you've read his work.

I did a download of Ulysses from Gutenberg, did an egrep -oi '[a-z]+' | sort
-fu > u, then aspell dump master > d, then sort -f d d u | uniq -ui; that
gives over 7000 seemingly unique words of the of the 29000 used in that book,
but many of them are misspellings, transcription errors, proper nouns, Greek
references, etc.

Here are a small handful selected at random; they are very probably not the
best examples, as there are far too many to examine to discern that:

    
    
        crookeding
        flusterfied
        holyeyed
        languideyed
        unportalling
        dullbrained
        darkshawled
        dedale
        overarsing
        heartbalm
        seacold
        beardframed
        doaty
        birdsnies
    

Many of those 7000+ words that aren't in aspell's dictionary on my machine
because they're archaic, legalese, obscure dialect, foreign allusions etc.,
but you can hardly read a paragraph without some word made up.

~~~
zwischenzug
Shakespeare's full of mis- and variant spellings too. He's also held up as an
example of someone that made up words. My point about Joyce was that, if you
want to hold up someone as a writer who has a large vocabulary by the
standards that have traditionally been applied (as he has been), then he
simply doesn't.

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jleyank
This kind of analysis should (also?) include checking what words were in
common usage prior to the writer vs. what words originated with said writer...

~~~
zwischenzug
I'm not sure how you'd determine that; I guess you'd need a definitive and
complete transcription of correctly-dated works. The OED is not a few man-
hours work, and even they hesitate to be definitive :)

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daimyoyo
The true power of Shakespeare's vocabulary isn't in the variety of the words
he used but how he used them. I'd imagine that having a complex rhyming scheme
and creating original content in iambic pentameter isn't easy and the fact he
pulled it off so eloquently is a testament to his mastery of the English
language.

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lelele
Shakespeare really is the king. His vocabulary was unexceptional, his stories
were copied from others and, still, yet his masterpieces are immortal.

That teaches us that we don't need either exceptional tools or ideas to
succeed.

~~~
zwischenzug
Dr. Faustus ain't too shabby for a young man. I wish Shakespeare had had a go
at that story.

