Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong; 
But pardon’t, as you are a gentleman. 
This presence knows, 
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d 
With sore distraction. What I have done 
That might your nature, honour, and exception 
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. 
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet. 
If Hamlet from himself be taken away, 
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, 
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. 
Who does it, then? His madness. If’t be so, 
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d; 
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. 
Sir, in this audience, 
Let my disclaiming from a purpos’d evil 
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts 
That I have shot my arrow o’er the house 
And hurt my brother.

(Ham.V.2.213-231)

…I would not necessarily recommend, however, taking this position in a situation where something real, like a friendship, is at stake.  Can we truly blame our gravest errors, transgressions, and wrongdoings on our past states of mind as if they were other people, disconnected from our present selves?  It’s comforting to think so.  But saying so may insult the person you’re trying to apologize to.  Instead of saying it wasn’t “you” that did something wrong, I recommend admitting the fault and following with a true apology.

They do not love that do not show their love.
(TGV.I.2.108)

This quote might be useful if you want to take a lover to task, very gently, for what you might see as reluctance in expressing their feelings. Beware though, as this could open a Pandora’s box you might later wish you’d left well and truly closed! Still, it’s a good quote to remind us all that a show of appreciation now and then is always gratefully received.

Photo by batega.

Google Fight says they’re tied. No matter which one you choose, people searching for one will have trouble finding the other. I want to lean toward using the “u,” simply because that’s how Shakespeare wrote “labour.” But maybe Google is trying to standardize on American English? And if that’s the case, I should write the title without the “u.”

I’m definitely going to lose sleep over this.

Alas, poor hurt fowl, now will he creep into
sedges.
(II.1.192-193)

Depending on your company, you may want to limit the size of the quote to “Alas, poor hurt fowl!” because then you won’t have to explain what sedges are.

My favorite misunderstood phrase:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

I was at the Globe and saw T-shirts that said this on one side, and then on the other: “Seriously, has anyone seen him?”

Of all places…

For shame, The Globe! “Wherefore” actually means “why,” not “where.”

One of the good things about No Fear Shakespeare (as opposed to the many bad things) is that it helps to clear up vocab issues like this. Watch these two entries here and here in the Show Us Your Shakespeare contest and you’ll see that “wherefore art thou Romeo?” actually means “why are you Romeo?” or some similar interpretation, not “where are you, Romeo?” as most people believe. The word wherefore is cleared up again in Julius Caesar by No Fear Shakespeare, as Shaksper.net points out:

“Tut, I am in their bosoms, and I know wherefore they do it.”- Act 5, Scene
1.

“I know how they think, and I understand why they’re doing this.”- Same
scene, No Fear Shakespeare translation.

http://chronicridicule.blogspot.com/2005/02/dude-youre-quoting-shakespeare.html

(I try to link to all blog posts that use “dude” in the title. That’s what kind of Shakespeare blog I’m running, here.)

Below are all the phrases Crash talks about in his post, each hyperlinked to the instance where they’re used in the plays.

• “It’s all Greek to me.”
• “She is more sinned against than sinning.”
• “I recall my salad days.”
• “He acted more in sorrow than in anger.”
• “His wish was father to that thought.” (from one of my favorite scenes!)
• “They vanished into thin air.” (two possible sources)
• “I won’t budge an inch.”
• “…green-eyed jealousy.” (two possible sources)
• “He plays fast and loose.”
• “She’s tongue-tied!” (a bunch of instances)
• “I am a tower of strength.”
• “I’ve been hoodwinked!”
• “We’re in a pickle.”
• “He angrily knit his brow.” (strange: all but one instance of this expression appear in Henry VI, the other in The Rape of Lucrece)
• “We make a virtue of necessity.” (and a variant here)
• “It was fair play.”
• “I didn’t sleep a wink.”
• “We stood on ceremony.” (what does this mean?)
• “I laughed myself into stitches.”
• “Make short shrift.” (what does this mean?)
• “I received cold comfort.”
• “That was too much of a good thing.”
• “I’ve seen better days.”
• “You’re living in a fool’s paradise.”
• “I hate being a foregone conclusion.”
• “…as good luck would have it.”
• “It’s high time that I read Antony and Cleopatra.”
• “These are the early days.”
• “Out, with bag and baggage!”
• “That’s the long and short of it.”
• “The truth will out.” (and a variant here)
• “You are my own flesh and blood.”
• “…until the crack of doom.”
• “I suspect foul play.”
• “…with neither rhyme nor reason.”
• “Give the devil his due.”
• “If the truth were known.”
• “Keep a good tongue in your head.”
• “Good riddance.”
• “She sent me packing.” (I use this one a lot)
• “He’s dead as a doornail.”
• “Your hat is an eyesore.”
• “I’m the laughing stock of the neighborhood.”
• “My boss is the devil incarnate.”
• “You stony-hearted villain!”
• “That child is rather bloody-minded.”
• “What a blinking idiot.”
• “What the dickens?!”
• And lastly: “But me no buts” …does not come from Shakespeare. It comes from Henry Fielding. This expression is just one of myriad things that get attributed to The Bard just because he’s so famous and thus naturally serves as a catch-all for everything of suspect or unclear origin.

Enjoy poking around that list! As a final note, let me just say that, like the 1,500 words Shakespeare supposedly invented, all of the phrases above probably can’t be credited to The Bard’s imagination. Even if he didn’t coin them, however, he may have been the first to write them down.

The Shakespeare Book of Lists

You may have seen my other Shakespeare BYKI lists covering Falstaff’s vocabulary. What is BYKI? BYKI is an online tool you can use to learn pretty much anything, even though the company that develops the software, Transparent Language, is focused on using it to teach foreign languages. I think that BYKI is perfectly suited for learning Shakespearean vocabulary, so I make wordlists on occasion and offer them on this site. To use the widget, simply click “Start Learning” and choose a mode (try Recognize It to start).

Why use my BYKI widgets? Because if you know Shakespearean vocabulary before you read the plays, you’ll know the meanings of difficult words as you encounter them, which will allow you to enjoy the flow of the story uninterrupted. This will increase your enjoyment of the plays dramatically (no pun intended). It’s critical to know the meanings of words like

• Dispatch
• Office
• Troth
• Verily

or you’ll miss out on some great literature.

The list below covers all of Will’s plays, and while many of the definitions given are for specific instances of the word (for instance, “power” will not always mean “army,” but it does in Antony and Cleopatra, Act III Scene 7) it will still be useful to know how the words can be used in different contexts. If you ever want to find occurrences of a given word in Shakespeare’s plays, I suggest you try the advanced search feature at Open Source Shakespeare. It’s very thorough.

Without further ado, here’s the list…

NOTE: Some words may look like they’re supposed to be verbs, like “mew,” which means “confine,” but if I didn’t write “to” in front of the word then it’s not intended to be a verb. A mew is actually a thing: a confine or a cage.

• advertising
• bandit
• critic
• hush
• investment
• kissing
• numb
• shooting star
• undress
• yelping
• zany

(Find more here.) Some of these words are difficult to accept as possibly coined by Will Shakespeare. While words like “zany” or expressions like “shooting star” seem quite inventable, words that are simple, grammatical variants of preexisting words like “kissing” and “undress” (from bases “to kiss” and “to dress,” respectively) seem more like they must have been circulating orally before Will wrote them down. Thus, if you were to revise common wisdom to be more accurate, you’d say that Shakespeare’s works contain the oldest written instances of about 1,500 English words… the difference being that the latter allows for the likely possibility that Will didn’t invent a good number of those words but rather borrowed them from Elizabethan England’s spoken vernacular. If you had been the first person to use the word metrosexual in a novel, 500 years from now it might have looked like you invented it—when, in fact, you heard it from your college friends while discussing why your male roommate owns 24 pairs of shoes.

Yet what’s the likelihood that Will Shakespeare happened to be the first person to write down so many common English words? Weren’t people writing in English for a long time before that? Aside from the obvious possibility that prior usages have simply been lost to the ravages of time, The ‘Pedia notes that prior to the sixteenth century “legal matters in England were conducted in French, Latin had been used to write history, philosophy, and theology, and for the most part [English] writers did not write in their native tongue [of English].” Apparently, Latin, not English, had been the language of choice for writers and poets until Shakespeare’s time, so it’s really not that surprising that he might’ve been the first person to pen them.

And yet… perhaps it’s not so unlikely after all that Shakespeare might truly have invented a good number of the 1,500 terms accredited to his imagination. From the same Wikipedia article linked to above, we learn:

From nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin and Greek and other modern Romance languages, it is estimated that between the years of 1500 and 1659 30,000 new words were added to the English language.

Wow, that’s 189 words a year or one new word every two days! So perhaps Shakespeare could’ve been making up all those words; everybody seemed to be doing it.

Such a rapid pace of linguistic creation seems strange for a time like the sixteenth century, when travel was arduous and communities were much smaller. Things tended change at a slower pace. But something special had appeared in the 1430’s that changed the pace of the spread of information in Europe: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. Suddenly more people could afford books, more people could read, and more text started being written in English. With so much new material and worldly attention giving it bigger shoes to fill, the English language was forced to grow. The language lacked a decent vocabulary and simply needed more words. From this perspective, it becomes more believable that Will could’ve invented a fair number of the words attributed to him… especially words like “puke” (which Shakespeare may have borrowed from German).

And let me tell you, 189 new English terms a year is nothing compared to the number of words invented annually in the face of the most modern technological marvel: the World Wide Web, which has had the effect of Gutenberg’s printing press times a thousand in terms of making information more widely available and connecting people. Think about how often you see unfamiliar terms in the vernaculars of techies, gamers, marketers, bloggers, and every other community nowadays. For instance, read the example for usage of the word “wi-five,” a gamer term, as defined by The Urban Dictionary:

wi-five December 11

It’s a high five that doesn’t involve actually contact, normally over a long distance where a real high-five isn’t possible. Mix of “wireless” and “high-five”, hence “wi-five” (wireless high-five).

Iain (yelling across the room): Dude, that mess was teh pwnz. Wi-five, brosef
Eric (in response): You need to chill with that nano shit, son

Forget the word “wi-five;” would you be as clueless as me if someone said to you, “You need to chill with that nano shit?” New English is constantly being forged by everyday authors, thinkers, and casual users of the Internet. And it’s being recognized by very legitimate authorities of language: Merriam-Webster just announced that its 2007 Word of the Year is “w00t.” Just check out some of these great sites that are entirely devoted to rooting out and defining new words on the fringes of English:

• The Urban Dictionary
• Double-Tongued Dictionary
• Wordspy

Each one of these posts multiple entries per day and still can’t keep up with the actual pace of linguistic creation. (Try subscribing to some of these by RSS or email… they’re fun!) My point is, if we invent dozens of words a day in the face of the technological and cultural revolution that is the Internet, then it’s not so hard to imagine that Will might have been inventing words like crazy in the face of the English language’s growth-spurt, spawned by a different but no less significant technological achievement.

Whether he really made them or not, Will Shakespeare gets popular credit for those 1,500 words. While you’ll probably never rack up so many yourself, if you stay on the cutting-edge of the English language you may, one day, get your own citation in the Double-Tongued Dictionary and live on forever in our lexicon… just like The Bard himself. Only slightly less famous.

Art contribution by MuLaN™.

PEDRO
What need the bridge be much broader than the flood?
(Ado.I.1.300)

(It’s followed by “The fairest grant is the necessity. | Look, what will serve is fit.” Pelican tells us this means “The best gift is whatever is needed.” I would add the word only–”…only what is needed.”)

Pedro says this to Claudio meaning that one need not say more than is necessary to properly convey one’s meaning (and readers of this blog may wish that I take Pedro’s advice). The expression, however, can be used to illustrate any situation in which a minimum requirement of something–anything–will suffice. For instance, you could say this to someone who comments on how small your beer fridge is… if you only need a small beer fridge to accommodate your drinking habits (”the flood”). Why get a bigger fridge?

I need a bigger fridge.

Photo by peter pearson.

The $250,000 question asks how many unique words Shakespeare used in his complete works. The answer is about 30,000. The average high school student, it turns out, uses about 10,000.

Lots of readily available written sources use a vocabulary that extends beyond a layman’s knowledge. There are lots of ways to improve your personal lexicon if you work at it a little, and that’s always rewarding for language-lovers. But what if you don’t want to sit down with a workbook or a self-help course?

The best option is probably to read. Yet, I find that when reading I’ll just infer the meaning of a word from its surrounding context or skip over it and move on. The meaning will become clear enough as I go. So I don’t really have to learn the words.

What’s great about Shakespeare is, it’s theater–it’s meant to be spoken aloud. If you read some passages aloud to yourself, you’ll realize quickly that you sound silly and awkward when you don’t know what a word means. You can’t create the proper inflection; the sentence doesn’t make sense without the meaning behind it, especially to the modern ear. So you go look up the word… and it’s so satisfying.

Try reading just one full play aloud to yourself, and really look up the words. I guarantee it’ll add several hundred good words to your vocabulary AND heighten your appreciation for the story you just read.

(I fell in love with Shakespeare after I read Twelfth Night aloud with my little brother and the girl I was dating. It changed the way I heard words forever.)