
Shakespeare's language not as original as dictionaries think - pepys
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/06/shakespeare-language-not-original-david-mcinnis-claim-oed-bias
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baristaGeek
Plutarch wrote 'Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans' (also called Parallel
Lives or Plutarch's Lives) somewhere around the second century AD and
Shakespeare wrote 'Antony and Cleopatra' in 1606. Shakespeare took 'some'
inspiration from Plutarch. Plutarch wrote in Greek, Shakespeare in
Elizabethian English.

Here's Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's work:

"...she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the River
Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of
silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes,
howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played up in the
barge.

Here's Shakespeare's work:

"The barge she sat in like a burnished throne, Burned on the water_ the poop
was beaten gold; Purple the sails and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick
with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and
made The water which the beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes"

This is definitely no coincidence. What's more interesting is that even though
it's almost a fact that Shakespeare had Plutarch open while writing this, we
can actually see him doing some creative work. He added some alliteration, and
for some reason we humans love to listen to a series of words that all start
with the same sound.

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conistonwater
Mark Forsyth's _Elements of Eloquence_ uses exactly this example for
alliteration, the resemblance between your comment and what he wrote is
uncanny. >:(

> _“The thing about this is that it’s definitely half stolen. There is no
> possible way that Shakespeare didn’t have North open on his desk when he was
> writing. But also, Shakespeare made little changes. That means that we can
> actually watch Shakespeare working. We can peep back 400 years and see the
> greatest genius who ever lived scribbling away. We can see how he did it,
> and it’s really pretty bloody simple. All he did was add some alliteration.”

Excerpt From: Forsyth, Mark. “The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the
Perfect English Phrase.”_

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gerbilly
>All he did was add some alliteration.

No that's not all he did, he also included some striking images, the throne,
the perfumed sail, the lovesick wind ...

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conistonwater
That's within the style of that book, it has a very light tone and doesn't
take itself all that seriously. That paragraph is specifically about
alliteration, and I'm sure Forsyth wouldn't actually disagree with you.

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conistonwater
In a way it's a rather strange idea, even if not taken to extreme, because his
plays absolutely had to be understandable to his audiences, which would have
put a limit on how many novel expressions he could have and still be
understood. After all, people do sometimes forget that Shakespeare was not
merely a manufacturer of devices to torture schoolchildren, but he was, in
fact, also a playwright.

Is it possible that what happened was that pre-digitization research was too
time-consuming, so the OED overemphasized easily available sources, like
Shakespeare, when looking for first uses of words?

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duaneb
Even if his allegedly invented words were entirely novel, I think it's
unlikely people would have had issues understanding him. The same mechanisms
(combining extant prefixex, suffixex, roots into new combinations and
onomatopoeias) are easily visible in slang today—just listen to hip-hop. Just
this morning I heard "discriminize" instead of "discriminate" to fit a rhyme
scheme. Is that really so different from creating "assassination" from
"assassin"?

But, it's a narrow interpretation of the results that this is novel.
Etymologists have always been extremely skittish of assigning firm origins to
words, much less calling Shakespeare an inventor of them himself. His
demonstrated vocabulary is simply massive, and statistically some of the words
are going to be early.

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lawpoop
This is purely speculative, but I think also that introducing new words, or
novel combinations would have kept audiences' ears "on their toes" and tuned
in to the dialog. The plays ran 2-3 hours. You have to keep the audience
engaged.

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JacobAldridge
I studied a reasonable amount of Shakespeare as part of my university English
and Drama studies (Class of 2002). While I had a pretty damn good scholar
running those courses, I didn't think there was anything unusual in the fact
that he always described these as "words or phrases that were first written
down by Shakespeare" rather than "invented by". Particularly when it comes to
slang, words/phrases are often written down at some distance after they become
commonly spoken.

Hopefully the digitisation of additional early modern and medieval works helps
with etymology - always frustrating to search for something and get six
competing theories, all of which seem equally specious.

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gumby
Doesn't really support or refute his argument (which I think is good) but this
reminds me of a great New Yorker cartoon from many years ago: two woman are
walking out of the theatre; the placard shows they have just seen Hamlet. One
woman remarks to the other, "That was just one cliche after another"

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TazeTSchnitzel
Reminds me of how so many quotes are misattributed. If it's attributed to
someone you've heard of, it's more likely they didn't say it.

~~~
zem
If, with the literate, I am

Impelled to try an epigram,

I never seek to take the credit;

We all assume that Oscar said it.

\-- Dorothy Parker

("Oscar" being Oscar Wilde)

