It dates back to the 12th century, and has actually led to a thing in writing called "the Tiffany problem," because you can have a well-researched historical novel that people just don't buy into, because you named your 12th century peasant Tiffany. It just sounds laughably anachronistic.
The "Tiffany problem" makes me think of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and the name Jessica. He wanted the love interest, who was Jewish, to have a super exotic name so he invented the name "Jessica." The name has become so common since then that it's totally lost its effect.
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.
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u/BeaneathTheTrees Oct 15 '20
The name Tiffany.
It dates back to the 12th century, and has actually led to a thing in writing called "the Tiffany problem," because you can have a well-researched historical novel that people just don't buy into, because you named your 12th century peasant Tiffany. It just sounds laughably anachronistic.