OED – Author Sarah Angleton

There’s a rumor running around out there on the Internet where, as everyone knows, all things are true, that William Shakespeare invented more than 1,700 words of the English language. If one considers that the Modern English of Shakespeare’s day was a fairly young language, then it makes sense that new words might have been developing pretty fast. And if you’ve ever met a writer, and particularly a poet, then you’ve probably noticed that they do occasionally invent new words or more likely, new uses of old ones. There’s no question Shakespeare did his fair share of that.

Also roaming around on the Internet lately is a fun challenge in which three columns of insulting Shakespearean words can be combined to come up with a single devastating slight to use in your next piece of writing. Most recently posted by The Writer’s Circle, this was issued as a challenge to me by a friend who knows I’m a writer who likes a good challenge as much as a like a good old timey insult.

Of course I’m only assuming these columns of words show up somewhere among the nearly 29,000 unique words spread across Shakespeare’s forty three surviving works. There are no citations, and I’m not going to take the time to search for them, because regardless of their origin, they make up some pretty fantastic insults.

Still, it’s worth noting I think that if Shakespeare invented 1,700 new words, that means his works contained roughly 6% unique words that would have been entirely unfamiliar to his audience.

Now, because I enjoy a challenge, I certainly don’t mind reading a work that is going to make me pick up a dictionary once in a while, but if I have to look up 6% of the unique words I encounter, I’m going to find myself pretty quickly frustrated by the beslubbering hasty-witted joithead who wrote them.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a brilliant insult is forming behind those eyes. Attributed to John Taylor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s worse than that, too, because the first English-language dictionary wasn’t put together until more than a century after the saucy doghearted coxcomb of a poet William Shakespeare produced his venerated works.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the written origin of English words, wasn’t even attempted until the second half of the nineteenth century and wasn’t completed until 1928. This thanks to somewhere around three thousand contributors who meticulously hunted through centuries of English language works to determine that 1,700 words or so probably came from the mind of that one old English playwright/poet that everyone had actually heard of.

In other words, the editors and contributors of the OED, while dedicated and deserving of our respect and thanks, may have occasionally been loggerheaded tickle-brained foot-lickers when it came to Shakespeare. Arizona State University English professor Jonathan Hope has been particularly effective in pointing out that OED contributors had more access to and read more carefully from Shakespeare’s works than from those of other writers who now in the digital age, we can more easily discover used quite a few of The Bard’s newfangled words before he did.

Just eleven more weeks until the release of my new historical mystery! I can’t share the cover just yet, but this picture gives a hint about the book, which contains no Shakespearean insults and probably very few made up words.
Photo by Winfred C. Porter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t think that discovery necessarily takes anything away from Shakespeare’s works or his influence on English literature and language. In reality, I think it makes him better, because he wasn’t asking his dictionary-deficient audience to puzzle out what he was trying to say. That joy he reserved for the mewling folly-fallen gudgeons in future high school classrooms.

To the audience of his day, and to those who care to notice today, what he did was use words well. And while he probably didn’t use most of the words in this handy kit in quite the same combinations I’ve attempted to use them in this post, there’s no question the man knew his way around an insult.

And now I challenge you to use one in the comments.

On April 10, 1567, Englishman Ralph Adderly wrote a letter to soldier and politician Sir Nicholas Bagnall. In it, Adderly described his brother-in-law John Bagot in an almost flattering way. The original excerpt is in pre-uniform English spelling, but translated to meet a more modern reader’s expectations it says this:

“I do assure you he is unsuspected of any untruth or other notable crime (except a white lie) which is taken for a small fault in these parts.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this is the first known reference to the phrase “white lie,” largely held to be a lie that’s not so bad—one that is told in order to avoid conflict, forestall embarrassment, or to protect the recipient, and is more or less benign in nature.

Of course, one man’s bent truth is another man’s vicious load of . . . well, you get the idea. Still, most of us have probably told the occasional white lie when the plain old truth might be needlessly hurtful or when we’re writing a blog post and our research has been somewhat less than thorough because man has it been a week.

I mean, I would never do such a thing, but I assume a lot of you probably have.

I know that the students and faculty of my youngest son’s high school have done so. It’s homecoming week here which means this coming weekend will be packed with football, parading, and dancing. The weekdays, too, have been filled with powderpuff football, pep rallies bursting with team spirit, and themed dress-up days.

My favorite so far has been “white shirt/white lies day.” On this day, students and teachers wore white tee shirts on which they had written a white lie. Some of the shirts I saw included: “I’m a people person,” “I’ll pay you back,” “I’m not smarter than you,” “I don’t seek validation,” and my personal favorite, “Just because I’m blonde doesn’t mean I’m dumb.”

I’m not entirely sure that the school should be promoting lying of any kind, just as I am entirely certain that some parent will be complaining about it at the next schoolboard meeting. It won’t be me, because I thought it was awfully clever, and in a way, kind of perfect for this particular school’s homecoming celebration.

And then there’s the pretty dresses and the corsages. Image by Stacey Kennedy from Pixabay

The notion of homecoming at my son’s school is itself a little bit of a white lie, as this is only the school’s second year in existence and the first year there will be a graduating class. What this means is that technically speaking, there is literally no one to come home to this school.

But every high school has homecoming football and pep rallies and dances and parades and spirit days. It’s too much fall fun to miss. So, what if it’s all a little bit of a lie? It’s not hurting anyone, and the decision to do all the homecoming things for the benefit of all the nonexistent alumni avoids the conflict that would arise from not doing it, which would also surely find its way to the next schoolboard meeting.

In the wise words of some guy named Ralph Adderly, it seems like nothing more than a small fault in these parts.