"___, thy name is ___" Where did this phrase come from?

[dnooman]

It’s not a searchable string of words BTW. So, where did this type of metaphor come from?

An example might be something like “Evil, thy name is Martha Stewart”!

I’m sure there is a traceable origin for this. Thanks in advance.

[Ice_Wolf]

Just a suggestion: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

[Aholibah]

Specifically, Hamlet, Act I, Sc. ii – “Frailty, thy name is woman.”

[Ice_Wolf]

@dnooman

It’s not a searchable string of words BTW.

Yes it is. You put the phrase “thy name is” in quote marks, and add “phrase”. That’s how I found my link.

[tomndebb]

Shakespeare appears to have coined that explicit construction. (I can find no reference that precedes him.) I wonder if that construction, however, was influenced by the typical translation of Mark 5:9 in which Jesus, casting out a demon, demands its name and receives the reply:

And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.

[yabob]

@tomndebb

Shakespeare appears to have coined that explicit construction. (I can find no reference that precedes him.) I wonder if that construction, however, was influenced by the typical translation of Mark 5:9 in which Jesus, casting out a demon, demands its name and receives the reply:

Of course, if you are quoting the King James version, that was commissioned a few years after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. How was the passage translated in the English translations that existed during Shakespeare’s life?

[MEBuckner]

@yabob

Of course, if you are quoting the King James version, that was commissioned a few years after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. How was the passage translated in the English translations that existed during Shakespeare’s life?

That would probably have been the Geneva Bible (Wikipedia entry with links to sites with the original text and digitial facsimiles of original printings), which in many respects was very similar to the KJV (and in this case pretty much identical).

And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion; for we are many.

Or, with the old-timey “f”-looking long esses (which the KJV would no doubt also have had):

And he afked him, What is thy name? & he anfwered, faying, My name is Legion; for we are manie.

(My computer will actually render the “long s”-- ſ – on my screen, but when I preview it’s just little boxes, so I’ll stick to f’s.)

[Derleth]

@MEBuckner

(My computer will actually render the “long s”-- Å¿ – on my screen, but when I preview it’s just little boxes, so I’ll stick to f’s.)

All rendering of characters is done at the browser’s end, so I find this fairly odd. Your browser must be set up with a different character encoding than the one you used to type the post. It appears just fine for me using UTF-8.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Derleth

All rendering of characters is done at the browser’s end, so I find this fairly odd. Your browser must be set up with a different character encoding than the one you used to type the post. It appears just fine for me using UTF-8.

Well, rendering is done at the browser end, but the document (or whatever generated the doc) can suggest how it ought to be rendered by using meta tags. When I view the page source, here’s what I see:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> 

…so this, it would seem, is the culprit.

[dnooman]

@Ice Wolf

Yes it is. You put the phrase “thy name is” in quote marks, and add “phrase”. That’s how I found my link.

I meant searchable on SDMB, it doesn’t like short words.