In a first year English class, my quasi feminist-Marxist professor told a rather quaint and adorable story about two nuns who attended a Shakespeare festival. In turns out, scholars had discovered this duo hadn't heard of Shakespeare let alone attended a single one of his plays. After sitting through several hours of performances, the nuns were then told to give their impression of the bard and his works. Being religious, they hemmed and hawed about the violence, the sex and the ribald humor but one of the ladies said something telling, if not humorous.
"He's not very original, is he?"
With a raised eyebrow the scholar leading the project further questioned the nun. Shrugging, she simply stated that he borrowed a lot of cliches. "You know," she said clapping her hands, "all's well that end's well, and to be or not to be. The show must go on. All those phrases."
I suppose for someone who's never heard of William Shakespeare, the idea that he was the originator of such phrases would seem perhaps outlandish if not remarkable as they have permeated our lives, our lexicon and our lay speech. The other day I found myself saying "there's something rotten in Denmark,"let alone "there's method in my madness" and "there's the rub" - all from Hamlet. Or on oft occasions, that I've murmured "neither here nor there", "mum's the word" and "for goodness sake" (Othello, Henry IV and Henry VIII).
Yet it is not only the phrases but the 'monumental' words the poet has minted that we should be thankful. The two nuns and the 'countless' numbers of English speakers don't realize we all quote Shakespeare every single, 'excellent' day of our lives. When we hurry, when we are fretful and lonely, when we are obscene or majestic, critical or frugal, when we hint at something or tell a barefaced lie, when we are submerged in responsibilities, we are heavily borrowing from a bard who may well have been borrowing from the Elizabethan London of the late 1500s, a time of innovation in language and culture.
Shakespeare's originality has been questioned as much as his identity yet the plainspoken beauty of the plays and the enriched vocabulary of our English tongue cannot helped but be noticed. He is said to have invented 1700 words (I highly recommend the website Shakespeare-online.com to further explore the list.)
So, in their college years, when students are puking after a night of trying to be fashionable, they may struggle with their papers in the bleak hours of the morning, deconstructing As You Like It or comparing Troilus and Cressida to Chaucer's version, nonetheless, they really should be thanking the poet from Avon.
But during Shakespeare's time, before and after, words still came into being as a result of poets and authors. Sir Thomas More, famous for his book, Utopia, coined 'absurdity' (which might explain his own tale of a perfect society), that the work of fiction itself exaggerates, rather than explains how human beings could live in exact harmony, one might say, acceptance of such a possibility is quite difficult.
Ben Johnson, a contemporary of Shakespeare is not a defunct poet, nor a clumsy one, but when we are wet, we can say we are damp due to him.
Then there are the 19th century authors many of us should really thank. Where would advertising slogans and marketers be without Samuel Coleridge, the opium intoxicated author of 'Kubla Khan' who gave us 'intensify'? If we didn't have Jeremy Bentham, how would we describe flights other than domestic, having provided airlines with the word 'international' (let alone committees, businesses and organizations that cross borders). Then there's Thomas Carlyle who without him, Green Peace and a host of other earth-friendly companies and activists wouldn't know that they were fighting for the 'environment'.
In the Pickwick Papers, Dickens described our first encounter with a 'butterfingers'. Meanwhile George Eliot, in a letter first used 'chintzy': back then chintz was a calico print from India said to be basic and cheap, hence anything we now refer to as pure crap or rudimentary in design (maybe one day Ikea will replace 'chintzy').
In the twentieth century, we saw a few selectively cynical words enter our lexicon. Norman Mailer's 'factoid' is a great example of how entertainment co-ops information. The ornery author, most famous for his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead, defines his manufactured term as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or
newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to
manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." When we learn about the latest Justin Bieber antic or reflect back on Paris Hilton's shenanigans and Britney Spear's bald head, what ever tidbits we glean and somehow cannot forget, they have no real relevance on our lives or world history. Like junk food, they sit unsettled in our mind's intestinal unconscious, half-digested and difficult to move.
The word 'meme' too reflects on our self-indulgent and mind numbingly oblivious culture. Richard Dawkins coined it in the 1970s to describe ideas, trends, behaviors and styles that spread from person to person, almost plague-like before dying. This past summer we had the ever-charitably-profitable and annoying ALS-Ice Bucket Challenge that turned everyone into viral fools of self-back slapping. The author of The Selfish Gene was most likely shaking his head as hordes of people stood in front of digital cameras for their fifteen seconds of Facebook fame.
In the world of technology, 'cyberspace' is another word which may have come from several authors, yet it was William Gibson who made it famous. Then's there 'Microcomputer' from Isaac Asimov, another sci-fi guru, author of I-Robot. Fondly enough without Karel Čapek Asimov wouldn't have had a title for his famous novel. In 1920 the Czech author published his most famous play, R.U.R. - Rossums' Universal Robots. 'Robot' is derived from the Russian работать (rabotat' - to work), a reference in some ways to the Soviet slave labour of the early 20th century.
Yet, without Dr.Seus (Theodore Geisl) we would have no idea how to describe the very people who love and follow fantasy and science fiction. In his book, If I Ran the Zoo, we find the first appearance of 'nerd' in our language.
There are a host of other words and this blog could continue on but it is safe to say, let alone even conclude that poetry and innovation have contributed largely to our expanding vocabulary. That from the Grand Willy himself to a self-titled doctor of children's fiction, language is heavily reliant upon and grateful for those artists and thinkers who bend and play with words. To quote Shakespeare, it appears English is quite dauntless in its ability to keep building and expanding.
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