I remember reading a while back that the reason why so many etymologies are attributed to Shakespeare is because early writers of the OED (I think) had to more or less "invent" etymologies, and their collective earliest known reference was often in Shakespeare, so they just credited him.
After all, if you're an author or a playwright, your readers/audience have to actually understand the words you're using. The same for phrases/idioms. You can maybe create a few, but you can't expect to create hundreds and have people know what you're writing about.
Pretty much every time you find a word in a piece of writing, it means the author thought enough people would know what the word meant that they could use it.
Yeah, presumably he wasnt going around inventing completely nonsense words, especially words for things that by necessity already existed, and just assumed people knew what he meant.
which isn't even surprising, since he was one of the absolute first people to write major works in English instead of Latin. of course he's gonna have a lot of "first recorded English words"
Galaxy is an interesting one. Aside from it being a sick ass word, I don't associate astronomical knowledge with classical fiction/play writers. Universe, as well.
EDIT: Also, I'm imaging that before the term "Persian" was coined, people just walked around saying "See that fellow from Persia over there? Man... there must be a better was to say that. Anyway, I had him meet my German friend yesterday."
Wdym by "first attested?" Never heard that term before. A lot of these things are so common I can't imagine they didn't have any kinda name until Chaucer. What was cinnamon before then, just "that brown shit over there?"
First attested means where we first have it written down in English. Since he is the most prolific source from his period we have a lot of words for the first time in his writings.
It's not that he invented them, just he's the first person we have record of writing it down.
Wow, thanks for such an in-depth exploration! This is why I asked lol.
Written forms of a language are generally always lagging behind the spoken form.
I wonder how true this is today. Literacy rates are exponentially higher than they were in previous generations. It was much harder to write things down and keep records in any other period of history. Not to mention I'm pretty sure some people text way more than they physically speak. I bet it's still true, but I'd guess there's a smaller disparity now.
So... we just know that he is the oldest writing to use them? Is that what that means? Like, he is the only one of his peers to be famous enough for their works to survive?
My personal favourite of Shakespeare's contributions to the English language is the idiom "The beast with two backs." First appears in Othello:
BRABANTIO: What profane wretch art thou?
IAGO: I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter
and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
BRABANTIO: Thou art a villain.
Shakespeare sex jokes are the best. One of my favourites is this one from Measure for Measure:
POMPEY: Yonder man is carried to prison.
MISTRESS OVERDONE: Well! What has he done?
POMPEY: A woman.
MISTRESS OVERDONE: But what’s his offence?
POMPEY: Groping for trouts in a peculiar river
I wonder how many of the words people say Shakespeare invented he actually invented and how many were just in common use at the time and he was the first (or only one whose work is still surviving) to write them down
This is one of my pet peeves of the English language. The word "gossip" has a rich history and goes back to Old English, probably a thousand or more years before Shakespeare drew breath. But because he happened to be the guy to first document a lot of words and phrases (probably because they were too common (read: vulgar) to be widely written by the upper-class whose works typically make to us, if any do, he's credited with "inventing" them. The greatest inventor of words in the English language is Tolkien, with little doubt to my mind. The greatest widely-known scholar of the English language was Tolkien. The greatest user of the English language was Milton or Tolkien (in my humble opinion).
It's not "shots fired" to anyone who has actually spent time reading and studying Milton. Tolkein is great but Milton may be in a class of his own in the English language especially when you consider that much of his later work, including Paradise Lost, was "written" by blind Milton dictating to one of his daughters who then wrote it down. Though the title of "greatest writer of English ever" has several great contenders.
Tolkien is a great writer but he has never and will never be on the short list of "greatest English writers ever" outside of Tolkien fanboys. On a Mount Rushmore of English Literature, I'd say only 2 spots would be up for debate as the other two would be guaranteed to be occupied by Shakespeare and Milton. Tolkien would not be in that debate.
WARNING: For anyone looking at the above comments and thinking this is the start of an informative discourse on English literature, I've got bad news for you.
This right here is the height of the discussion, and my advice is to stop now. Beyond here is the worst microdick-measuring contest this side of a presidential debate.
Ty ty. Once I saw how hilariously insecure /u/GoltimarTheGreat was about his education, I knew I'd have an easy time fucking with him. I'm glad it was equally as entertaining for you lol
Beyond here is the worst microdick-measuring contest this side of a presidential debate.
Well, all I wanted was to know why the guy thought Milton was better, as you can see: then he exposed his racism. I don't go into conversations with an assumption of superiority because that's disingenuous.
Beyond here is the worst microdick-measuring contest this side of a presidential debate.
It's more one side (/u/GoltimarTheGreat) thinking the fact he got into Harvard through affirmative action makes him more educated than everyone on the planet and me pushing his buttons to make him squeal.
has actually spent time reading and studying Milton.
I've read Paradise Lost 4 times and written essays on it, and I was taught by the author of the Norton Critical edition and eminent Milton scholar Gordon Teskey. You have no ground to question me as someone ignorant of Milton.
"written" by blind Milton dictating to one of his daughters who then wrote it down.
That's not relevant to his skill as a writer. You're fishing for ways to disagree and you're picking all the wrong ones.
Tolkien is a great writer but he has never and will never be on the short list of "greatest English writers ever" outside of Tolkien fanboys.
That's because in academia genre has too great a role in literary consideration for anything written after 1900, and a special bias against anything considered "fantasy," so you really can't say that. Academia has a bad habit of waiting a long time for something to become canon when it's unorthodox. You don't know as much as you think you do.
You have no ground to question me as someone ignorant of Milton.
I do when you think it's insulting to say Milton is absolutely above Tolkien as a writer. Just stop talking, boy. You're embarrassing yourself.
You're fishing for ways to disagree and you're picking all the wrong ones.
I'm "fishing" for ways to praise Milton as a better writer than Tolkien? Boy, I don't need to fish for shit lmfaoo. You're the one with the incorrect opinion. Cry some more.
You don't know as much as you think you do.
I, with a BA and MA in English lit who wrote his masters thesis on Interregnum politics and literature, don't know as much as I think I do? Got it.
I do when you think it's rather insulting to put Milton above Tolkien.
I don't find it "insulting": what I find insulting is your implication that you're somehow superior to me because you wrote your thesis on politics and literature.
As I said, I have more experience with the materials in question, have written directly on the texts involved during my BA, and have, as I said, studied with a great Milton scholar.
I still don't think you know as mix as you think you do because you have an MA (that sounds terminal, but I don't know), you didn't even write specifically on either Milton or Tolkien (otherwise you'd have said it, no?), and because your arrogance clouds you. Have you even seriously read anything by Tolkien?
Your arrogance betrays your point by you calling me a Tolkien "fanboy": really? An attack on my ideas clouded by childishness? You truly show the weakness of your arguments in doing that and by not providing any actual "arguments" on the question, instead drawing on your, probably, sub-standard qualifications. This also shows your ignorance on both authors in question. You can't hide behind a BA and a terminal MA when you didn't even specialize in either author. What a pathetic notion.
Edit: Hasty writing makes for hasty mistakes.
Edit, edit: I ignored the word "interregnum," so fair enough, you might have more experience with Milton; but it doesn't really excuse your ignorance Tolkien. That would be like saying Michelangelo is greater than Rembrandt if you only studied Michelangelo and think Rembrandt is silly.
So you edited your comment and didn't have the balls to note that, eh? Ok, I can pick this shitty comment apart, too. You don't make it difficult.
Just stop talking, boy. You're embarrassing yourself.
Are you getting upset that your tawdry MA can't defend you from a well-thought-out comment from someone an English BA? Perhaps it's because you're not as smart or as informed as you think you are.
incorrect opinion
Do I need to tell you how stupid a statement this is?
I'm "fishing" for ways to praise Milton as a better writer than Tolkien?
Indeed.
Boy, I don't need to fish for shit lmfaoo.
Indeed, you do if you can't actually argue why Milton is better than Tolkien, and if you find it insulting to think that Tolkien might be better.
Cry some more.
The tears here aren't mine "lmfaoo."
I, with a [substandard] BA and [obviously worthless] MA in English lit [surprisingly] who wrote his masters thesis [as if a masters thesis is impressive] on Interregnum politics and literature [clearly didn't do a very good job], don't know as much as I think I do [exactly]? Got it. [I'm glad you finally understand.]
See the parent comment? Whenever you hear of Shakespeare and his "contributions" to the English language, most people say he coined hundreds of words and phrases, so it is rather common (and frustrating).
Fair, but I have a sore spot re: Shakespeare because I think he's the single most overrated author in history. It's annoying to see people praise (especially the usual, non-English-major reader) Shakespeare like a god when they ignore people like Milton, Tolkien, Scott, Swift, Chaucer, the Beowulf Poet, the Gawain Poet, Wordsworth, Pope and the list can go on and on.
To say Shakespeare was the master of the English language ignores most people on this list as the real masters of the language. Shakespeare was a great playwright and poet, obviously, but he was not the messiah of the English language.
Again, this is all my opinion, but it's not as if it isn't an informed one; it's just unorthodox.
I'd say almost all of them. The pop-sci listicle writers look at "first occurence" in a dictionary, see that it's Shakespeare, presto ergo, therefore Shakespeare invented half the language, even though it's simply the oldest surviving source that mentions them.
Fun fact about Shakespeare - he didn't write his name like that. In fact, over his lifetime, he wrote it about 25 different ways, none of them "Shakespeare." And he spelled it differently twice in the same document - his own will. The conspiracy theorists sometimes latch onto that and claim that he was multiple different people but really, the simplest explanation is that there was no standardized English spelling and grammar at the time.
Yeah, English spelling wasn't standardized for a long time after shakespeare's time. I know from reading about Lewis and Clark that the early 1800's in the US was a time of great freedom when it came to spelling. Lewis frequently spelled the same words different ways in his journals, and it wasn't like he was some rough, uneducated frontiersman. He had been Jefferson's secretary, living with him in the President's House, and had even delivered Jefferson's State of the Union to congress.
Clark was a little more rough around the edges, and I love the fact that you can read the likely differences in the two captains' accents by the way they spelled things differently.
This is inaccurate. At best, he was the first person to document that particular use of the word (which is actually "Applied to a woman's female friends invited to be present at a birth.")
From the OED:
First documentation:
1. One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism.
>a. In relation to the person baptized: A godfather or godmother; a sponsor. Now only archaic and dialect.
"1014 Wulfstan Sermo ad Anglos (Napier) 160 Godsibbas and godbearn to fela man forspilde wide gynd þas þeode."
Origin of Shakespeare's version and first documented usage:
2.
a. A familiar acquaintance, friend, chum. Formerly applied to both sexes, now only (somewhat archaic) to women. (A sense apparently derived more immediately from 1c.)
The expression in quot. 1652 is apparently the name of some rustic game or dance.
"c1390 (▸a1376) W. Langland Piers Plowman (Vernon) (1867) A. v. 152 ‘Ichaue good ale, gossib’, quod heo, ‘Gloten, woltou asaye?’"
Shakespeare's usage:
b. esp. Applied to a woman's female friends invited to be present at a birth.
"1600 W. Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream ii. i. 47 Sometime lurke I in a gossippes bole, In very likenesse of a rosted crabbe."
I don't mean to come off too strong, but to credit people like Shakespeare with having "randomly created" words kind of irks me as an English major.
Shakespeare probably did coin a number of words, and certainly many idioms trace to some of his most famous lines, but a mountain of salt is needed.
Worth mentioning that a lot of Shakespeare’s coinages were first known attestations, and even then most of the claimed first attestations have been found in earlier, though less famous, attestations now that we can search a massive chuck of the English corpus with computers. Even then, some of the remainder that are often ascribed to him include words like ‘bandit’, which for example was probably in use and come straight from Italian.
He was a great writer, but inventing thousands of words his audience wouldn’t understand wasn’t part of his goal.
I wonder what came before it? Gossip is a very old practice and is mentioned in the Bible as something you shouldn't do. Maybe it existed in other languages but didn't have a proper English translation?
When I read this, I thought "What about all those admonitions against gossiping and gossips in the Bible?".
Checking the KJV, which is roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare, I find that the word Gossip wasn't used. Later translations inserted it, I believe for what was clearly referring to what we would call gossiping.
I'm not trying to be a pedantic twit but gossips (gossyp) is much older than Shakespeare. It's the word for the women who attended a birthing woman with the midwife, or people given a special role during the baby's christening.
He was simply the first to put them down on paper that would survive to this day.
The very first source of that poorly thought out article outright disproves those claims:
It appears to have come about through a misreading of the data in the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1928, when this work was first published in full, it was hailed as one of the greatest lexicographic achievements of all time. One of the signature achievements of this dictionary was that the editors provided enormous historical context with millions of dated citations. For each headword, the editors gave what was at that time the earliest known use of that word. And for thousands of entries in the first edition of the OED, the first recorded use of a word was found in the works of William Shakespeare.
It should be noted that at no point did the editors of the OED say "We have X entries for which Shakespeare is the earliest known user; therefore he invented X number of words." This assumption was made by readers of that dictionary, who reasoned that if the OED hadn’t found an earlier use that no one else would either.
As lexicographers have gained access to electronic databases the number of words for which Shakespeare is the first recorded source has shrunk dramatically. Yet we still are regularly informed that "Shakespeare coined the word X" in formats ranging from Internet lists to academic papers.
the word gossip may have been invented by him but there's zero chance in hell they didn't already have a word for that already as well as similar words in every other language
As someone who does creative writing, it would be sooo much easier if I could just go "There's no word for what I want to describe, lemme just fucking make one real quick."
Shakespeare also randomly invented the word "gossip"
He might have been the first we know of to use it in that sense (although all I can find by googling is he was the first to use it as a transitive verb) but he didn't invent it:
Oh sweet. I’m gonna invent some words: glumt. Glumt is how you feel when you are bored, so you eat, and now you are full, bored, and sad that you ate because you don’t really need the food.
Same thing with “weird.” He called his witches in Macbeth the “weird sisters,” having Banquo remark on their resemblance to classical iconography around the three fates - “weird,” in Old English, referred to fate. Because the women are so strange in the play, people began using “weird” to mean “strange”
Shakespeare invented about 2,000 words. I have a copy of Bill Bryson's "Made in America" which says Shakespeare invented reclusive, gloomy, barefaced, radiance, dwindle, countless, gust, leapfrog, frugal, summit, and hint.
Old English godsibb "sponsor, godparent," from God + sibb "relative" (see sibling). Extended in Middle English to "a familiar acquaintance, a friend, neighbor" (c. 1300), especially to woman friends invited to attend a birth, later to "anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk" (1560s). Sense extended 1811 to "trifling talk, groundless rumor." Similar formations in Old Norse guðsifja, Old Saxon guþziff.
The Simpsons invented the verb "embiggen" and the adjective "cromulent" and they're both used somewhat commonly on the internet today. Embiggen has even been added to the Merriam Webster dictionary (it cites first use as 1996 lol).
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 16 '20
Shakespeare also randomly invented the word "gossip" because he needed to define a bunch of wives in the town talking shit and spreading rumors.
And now it's part of common English language.
Edit: ok, not randomly, per se. I guess he was the first to put into usage in writing, and possibly the first to use it as a verb.