November 24, 2004
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Love the Mongrelized Mishmash
From today’s super-fun NYT review of The Stories of English, a book about the past and future of the lingua snarka:
The English lexicon doubled in size during the early modern period, helped along by the printing press, the roving English maritime fleet and writers like Shakespeare, whose contribution Mr. Crystal examines in some detail. He concludes that it was far less than is often claimed (he cites a television commentator who asserted that “Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language”), but still miles ahead of the competition. There are about 2,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary that first appear in Shakespeare’s works, as compared with 800 for the playwright and satirist Thomas Nashe, the second-place finisher in this competition. Mr. Crystal pauses a moment to shed a tear for such lost Nashisms as “bodgery” (“botched work”), “tongueman” (“good speaker”) and “chatmate” (“person to gossip with”).
Note that bodgery.com, tongueman.com, and chatmate.com would all make excellent blog domains.
Actually, I’m kinda afraid to type in ‘tongueman.com’ for fear it already exists.
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Comments
"Actually, I’m kinda afraid to type in ‘tongueman.com’ for fear it already exists."
What kind of New Media Revolutionary attitude is that? Be not afraid, O Snarky InfoNaut! Type away boldly, with a finger ever ready at the reset button.
Man, how dissappointingly mild when I went there after all.
Being listed first in a word's entry in the OED doesn't mean you invented the word: only that as far as the not-always perfect research of the OED's scholars can tell, yours is the earliest extant text that records usage of the word.
Which is not to say that this contribution isn't significant. Shakespeare's texts are so comparably well-preserved, and so widespread, that despite what still seem like his many archaisms, Bill S. from Stratton probably did more to keep peculiar Renaissance words in circulation (and speech) than anyone (except the authors of the King James Bible).
A better case could be made for Shakespeare's widespread introduction of loanwords into English: he was a terrific listener and borrower of other languages.
WOW
that makes you wanna invent some cool words!
but all the cool words had allready been invented...
oh,well, at least I can invent words in hebrew.
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