If you’ve ever stated you’ve been on a wild goose chase, or tried to interrupt the ice, or worn your coronary heart in your sleeve, you’ve been quoting Shakespeare, maybe with out being conscious of it.
Shakespearewallas have surmised that the Elizabethan poet and playwright launched over 1,700 phrases and phrases into the English language, a lot of that are in frequent use at the moment, spoken by individuals who would possibly by no means have learn a single phrase of the Bard of Avon.
The dramatist coined phrases by turning nouns into verbs, and vice versa, verbs into adjectives, including prefixes and suffixes or inventing utterly new phrases, akin to ‘puking’, in As You Like It: “At first the infant/Mewling and puking in its nurse’s arms.”
Shakespeareisms, to emulate the author in phrase coinage, embrace from A in ‘amazement’, by B in ‘birthplace’, to W in ‘watchdog’ and ‘well-read’, because the Bard undoubtedly was.
According to language analysts, Shakespeare used over 31,500 phrases in his complete corpus. Extrapolating from this, he in all probability had a vocabulary of over 66,000 phrases, as in contrast with a median English speaker of at the moment who is aware of between 10,000 and 20,000 phrases, relying on degree of training.
Considering that advances in science, expertise and business exercise on a world scale have enlarged the English language to some 273,000 phrases, a quantity a lot bigger than the vocabulary of Elizabethan occasions, Shakespeare’s word-power was extremely prodigious.
Shakespeare’s surviving works embrace 38 performs, 154 sonnets, and a number of other different poems. Besides writing, he additionally acted in not less than 4 of his personal performs, together with Macbeth, As You Like It, Henry IV, and Hamlet. This hectic schedule, dictated by monetary necessity, compelled him to write down at breakneck velocity, typically finishing a playscript in a few days. The livid tempo presumably spurred his verbal inventiveness, conjuring a legacy of phrases and phrases which he has bequeathed to us.
A legacy which we all know “in our heart of hearts” (Hamlet)is not going to “vanish into thin air” (Othello)in “one fell swoop” (Macbeth), however will “come full circle” (King Lear), by no means being “too much of a good thing” (As You Like It).
Disclaimer
This article is meant to deliver a smile to your face. Any connection to occasions and characters in actual life is coincidental.
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