It’s pretty incredible how many words he invented.
My personal favorite Shakespeare expression is “salad days”, meaning the idyllic days of youthful peak.
Hard to believe neither the OP nor this link included my favorite – “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
I’m pretty sure Shakespeare didn’t coin “baited breath.”
She was beaten to it by Bernard Levin.
“Dead as a doornail”
Waiting with ‘bated breath’ (as opposed to baited)
“In a pickle”
“Methinks she doth protest too much” comes in handy quite often.
“In my heart of hearts” and “in the mind’s eye” both get used a lot.
I believe Shakespeare coined the portmanteau bodacious as well.
Someone tell me why this one drives me up the wall so much. Am I just being a twit for jumping down someone’s throat over baited/bated? The other one that sends me over the edge (realize that I may be hijacking my own thread) is (and I see this a lot because I’m a college sports fan) is so-and-so team earned a birth in the tournament. :smack: And when I call them on it, the defense is that that their season is being reborn in the form of the postseason. Kill me now. :smack::smack:
If Shakespeare created all the words attributed to him, nobody would have been able to understand the performances at the time. I believe he was just one of the first authors to use common slang rather than a more formal verse. The slang he used could have been normal “bar talk” for a hundred years before he was born.
Exactly. People who post lists of words he supposedly “invented” are just misunderstanding the practice of lexicographers of noting the earliest known, surviving, recorded usage. Historically, words tended to be used orally for decades or even centuries before they were first written down. And even when they were first written down, if it wasn’t by someone famous like Shakespeare, the record didn’t always persist until the time the lexicographers were writing the dictionary. And even if it did survive, there’s no guarantee they were actually aware of its existence.
True, but whether he coined them or not we still owe their continued usage to him.
It’s quite possible but without any evidence of the word being used earlier, we can’t know if it was a well-known slang in the vernacular or if it sprang fully formed from his brain so it’s a fruitless avenue to go down. And of course, it’s quite possible for someone to understand a new word based on the context of the sentence. I assume the first time someone referred to one of your online statements on this board as a post, you weren’t immediately confused as to why they were talking about an upright piece of lumber planted in the ground? Just as you can draw inferences about new words from how they are used, so too could Elizabethan audiences decode such cryptic words as vasty and bedroom.
But who eats salad at that age? “Salad Days” ought to refer to the time when you’re middle aged, overweight, and dieting heavily.
Carefree youth ought to be called “Pizza Days” or “Ice Cream Days”.
If you’re from Birmingham, England and losing an argument - which isn’t likely - you can always come off the winner, simply conclude: “Anyway, Shakespeare was a Brummie!”
“Splendor in the grass”…
:dubious: Stratford is some twenty miles away from Birmingham, and I would be very surprised if natives of Stratford, even today, consider themselves Brummies. Certainly they would not have done so in Shakespeare’s time, which was well before Birmingham began the explosive growth (in the 18th century) that turned it into a large city and the regional centre.
A side question, if I may. Aside from the obvious London, what were the major English cities of Shakespeare’s day? Was Manchester around, for example, and important? Or Liverpool?
"For those who know the older spelling or who stop to consider the matter, baited breath evokes an incongruous image; Geoffrey Taylor humorously (and consciously) captured it in verse in his poem Cruel Clever Cat:
*Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death. *"
I agree that the wrong spelling is annoying. But most people have only ever heard the phrase, not read it.
I don’t claim to be an expert on this issue, but I believe Manchester, like Birmingham, was a no-account place that suddenly grew explosively during the industrial revolution. As Liverpool is a port, it may have been a bit more significant earlier on, but its real growth too came when the industrial mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire began exporting their products through Liverpool. (Perhaps Liverpool’s growth began a bit earlier, in the 17th century, because of the slave trade, although I think Bristol was the more important slave-trade port.)
The more important towns before the industrial revolution were often what are now the county towns (i.e., county administrative centers, and often towns from which a county derives its name, such as Lancaster, Warwick, or York), which are usually, now, far from being the largest towns in their county.
To wrench this back a little more toward the thread topic, think of places that have character (usually a duke or earl or something) named after them in one of Shakespeare’s history plays.
I do like some of his works, but Shakespeare has also inspired me to utter the phrases “I’m bored”, and “This sucks”.
Funny, I can’t find an Orléans or Burgundy anywhere on a map of England. You sent me on a wild goose chase, man.
But seriously, thanks for the interesting response.
“…My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood…”
So I guess she could have used mint chocolate chip in the same metaphor.
“Salad days” and “Sea change” were the two I thought of when I read the thread title. I was unaware of a bunch of more “normal” terms though! ETA, reading more, I do suspect a lot of those are common English phrases that happen to appear in Shakespeare, not things he invented.