A joke I heard (or read) many decades ago went something like: "Oh I read Shakespeare, I don't know why people give him so much credit, he just seems to have strung together a bunch of well known sentences"
"Être ou ne pas être : telle est la question" Shakespeare en français ! Votre chaîne est absolument fantastique. J'adore vos vidéos et, surtout, votre sens de l'humour. Merci et à la revoyure. Et vive Shakespeare 🙂
Even though Shakespeare's works have become high brow culture, I've often felt that he was really a person who wrote for the common people. His plays were considered popular entertainment in his time, not stuffy and sophisticated as they are sometimes presented these days. With that in mind, I've often thought that given his unremarkable upbringing and education, he probably used words and expressions that he heard around him, so many of the new words that appear in print for the first time may well have been in common use when he was writing and so he really didn't invent a lot of these words, he simply was the first, or among the first, to put them to paper.
Shakespeare, if he is anything like me, must have had such an interest in people, full stop. He must have been listening, always, and holding on to what he heard around him. How else does one learn to embody so many types of characters with a single quill?
As a Dutchie, I was surprised when you said that "to rant" is from Dutch. I looked op "ranten" and it is not in the Van Dale online dictionary. We should use it again
The thing I've heard a lot of lately is that as English as a whole was rapidly evolving during that period, many of Shakespeare's new words are more likely words that had started being used by young people of the era than actually being invented by him. Or in other words, that Shakespeare was using contemporary slang in his plays and happens to be the first person to have recorded them.
I feel like you didn't give du weight to the possibility that some (or many) of the words could have been in use in the spoken language around him already. Crediting it all to him directly seems a bit unfounded, though I'm sure he came up with quite a few on his own as well. Though potentially being the first to commit thousands of new words to text is still very impressive. Great video overall though, learned a lot :)
Were you watching the same video as me? Rob makes it quite clear that any number of these words were used in common parlance prior to Shakespeare fiddling with them to produce a variety of neologisms, thus broadening the meaning of the original.
The issue here is mostly "invention", since anyone can add or remove an affixe. The time frame also helped (the invention of the printing press, the low literacy, etc.) so he did write them down and popularise them, no proof he didn't heard them by someone else. something we'll never know.
I think all these 'new words' had been in popular use before they entered into Shakey's plays. After all, the audiences of these plays were common everyday working people and they would not have paid money to hear words they didn't understand. In the same token, Beethoven did not invent the symphony and Mozart did not invent the string quartet; they merely perfected the pre-existing music forms.
True, but considering that they are also counting things like adding un- before a word or -ing after it. Or using an existing word in a slightly new way. Most of them were not just introduced from nowhere. It was often more like wordplay and the audience would’ve recognized it as such.
I like the comedy series "Upstart Crow" It's a hilarious take on a lot of these stories and rumors around Shakespeare. David Mitchell as Will is wonderful!
Even if he didn't coin all these words, he was undeniably creative and clever with his play with existing words. "Bedroom" in this case is such an interesting play of words in this situation.
Thank you for calling the idea that Shakespeare didn't write his plays a conspiracy theory. It is. All the references to him not being capable make me think of Benjamin Franklin. He was a business man, writer, scientist, organizer, diplomat, but he was only a son of a poor candlemaker, never went to a university, and had a common law wife who he impregnated after restarting their relationship after her husband ran off. Deborah Franklin who was not well educated (likely due to the times she lived in and her family) never went to Europe (possibly due to fear of sea) and died before 1776. As for the positive assertion that someone else wrote the plays, there is no direct proof. No manuscripts for Shakespeare writings in any of the candidates' papers.
Regarding skepticism that a man of Shakespeare’s background couldn’t have been the greatest writer in the English language: people point out that there was only one Enlightenment Philosophe who was famous both in the sciences and in letters, and that is Benjamin Franklin: a runaway indentured servant who started out with nothing. Commentators have also pointed out that the American president who was the most talented writer was Abraham Lincoln, born in a frontier cabin and without even completing an elementary education. Genius is often sui generous.
I've tried to thing of something, but just got a 404 error. Actually, this would make a great RobWords episode. Traditional terms in IT have repurposed words like compile, run, open, close, file. The other terms that have leaked from their IT usage would be: bug (initially an engineering term), debug, boot, bandwidth, and references to a version number of an item (e.g. my exercise plan 2.0). I've seen a UA-camr use instantiate in a sentence not related to programming, but that could a repurposed word too. There are probably many others.
I think we will lose more than we gain because high schoolers/college students are not learning Greek and Latin where our more nuanced words come from. They also are not reading enough Shakespeare to get lots of the Anglo-Saxon words.
The Shakespeare Folio came out in 1624, including many new works and revisions to old ones. You need your search parameter to go to 1624 otherwise you will not get a good count.
RobsWords video? That's an instant click. Video about shakespeare? That's an instant click. RobsWords video about shakespeare? You better believe that's an instant click.
Clough suggested an Exchange on the Antwerp model in 1562, and Gresham founded The Royal Exchange in 1571(opened and sponsored by Queen Elizabeth ). This would bring a lot of European merchants to the City - which is walking distance from Southwark ( I know, I’ve worked there enough….). It’s almost like easy trade makes for artistic growth…..
Well, when you account for the fact that quite a few of them are merely new Derivative Forms, rather than Entirely new words, nor new, contextually clear, usages for existing words, and then you realise that all of them are spread out over 40-ish works so the audience isn't running into them all at once... And then, yes, all the words where they're new in the sense that it's the first time they appear in texts that survived long enough for anyone to make record of them rather than the first time they were ever used at all mitigates the issue still further. Also, a large part of how incomprehensible so many people today find Shakespere (though certainly not the Entirity of it!) has more to do with their poor skills in Present Day English, even before getting into compensating for a couple of centuries of linguistic drift. ... That and the fact that it's all written in Script format, intended to be read aloud and Heard, not to mention written largely as poetry which further doubles down on that, so trying to understand it just from silently reading the text, rather than properly Performing it, is something of a struggle.
Just starting the video, so idk if it'll be mentioned or not, but.. My fave alledged Shakey coined word is: SWAGGER Mostly bc of how it's used these days lol
Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets in the same way that Trevithick, with little formal educations, invented the steam locomotive. Many of the parts were there for both men,but both made use of them in new ways.
I have really enjoyed Shakespeare since high school, where I was introduced to him. It's amazing to me that his comedies are still funny today. Timeless. Like Lucille Ball.
Everyone knows that, according to the Monty Python sketch; "Stake Your Claim", it was contestant Franz Schultz that wrote all of Shakespeare's plays, and that he and his wife wrote all the sonnets. Facts, Rob, Facts! (Schultz later returns to declare that he wanted to be a lumberjack - cue music...)
Everytime I see Shakespeare's name, I remember the fact who also wrote his name as something like "William Jacque Spear" And I think that might be the most likely version.
Sounds like having to stick within a meter, lead to innovation. Limit leading to creativity! 15:42 haha you said a version of this literally as I wrote this
This reminds me a French word "invented" (popularised, actually) by Victor Hugo. Yes, only one word! The word is "pieuvre", which means octopus. The word is originaly from the Channel islands, where Hugo was exiled. He used it in his novel Toilers of the Sea, and the word soon became more popular than the previous word ("poulpe", which is still in use).
15:45 I feel like the rigorous metre of iambic pentameter, & the desire to entertain with wordplay is what funnels Shakespeare into writing each of these words in novel ways. I feel like while we should give credit where it's due -- we should both talk about the nuances of evidence about what Shakespeare wrote alone (still great feats), which he plagiarized, which he collaborated on with ghost writers who couldn't publish back then, etc -- while we do that we should also reframe Shakespeare less as a great individual, but rather as the archetype of the intellectual and artistic upheavals of the time
Many of these words are also being used just in public, by humanity, whether speaking English, French, etc so you can think of "Shakespeare" rather as a symbol of collective lexical production rather than a mere person, and also rather than an isolated genius "great man".
20:00 regarding classism: being such a prolific wordsmith would probably be *aided* and even *required* by 1. Not having the obscure academic grammar 2. Having both the vulgar masses and the erudite/at least literate gentry as your audience 3. Once again, making yourself rhyme & speak in iambic pentameter.
Even I, a lowly scientific writer, have coined a few neologisms in my time. My personal favourite was “ouroborosly” to describe a field of research so self obsessed it was eating itself. I can believe the 1700 figure, creating new words is fun 😁
Shaky... This is how not-Blackadder calle Shakespeare in the famous sketch starring Mr. Atkinson & Mr. Laurie... "To be a victim of all the earthly woes or not to be a coward and take Death by his proffered hand" "I'm sure we can get that down!"
Shaky (Shakey?) is certainly acceptable, but I'm not at all confident that it tops Big Willie Shakes. Thanks, Rob! I suppose I should say _I thank you,_ instead; sounds a bit more Shakespearean that way :D
4:20 I mean, one way to confirm that would be if there is a cognate in other Germanic languages. And there are! German: küssen Dutch: kussen Danish: kysse Swedisch: kyssa Norwegian: kysse/kyssa Icelandic: kyssa
It's not the verb "kiss" that Will is supposed to have invented, but the conjugation "kissing" that had never been written down before, but Rob contends must have been said by people, without being told how to by Shakespeare.
@roBWords I always have wondered why some English native speakers put an r sound after idea and some other worfd. Could you please make an episode shedding some light on this phenomenon?
The KJV 1611 would have also had a huge influence on that time period being so prolific. Both it and Shakespeare's writings were constantly adapted for over a hundred years... we should have continued that process.
I just had a right 'Twilight Zone' moment. On my home feed on the TV, this vid, with your face was right next to a vid about David Coote, THAT ref! 😮 Thought I was seeing things😱
It's also true that this fertile time for the English language was the era of William Tindale, the authors of the Geneva Bible and (just within Shakespeare's lifetime) the King James Bible of 1611.
Is it possible that because he was writing dialogues in plays representing spoken exchanges rather than writing in a fixed 'classic' reading text that wasnt far removed from an era of latin only/exclusive/religious/monkish books. It stands out in his work compared to other texts from that time, like letters (writing by literate people) or 'official' publications (that were corrected before printing)
I always felt that if he had invented words and just included them without definition, how would anyone understand what was going on? I often wondered if a lot his inventions were just the first recorded use of words already in use.
I thought you were going to talk about the Richard III fallacies :( The Richard III Society is a great resource, but I always like to hear other takes on the subject.
People mention also that the few fragments of handwriting we have that are attributed to shakespeare aren't consistent in spelling. Like, we have examples of Shakespeare's signature and he spells his own name differently each time. THis is so called 'proof' that Shakespeare really was a nearly illiterate bumpkin. Thing is, when Shakespeare was writing, the English language was at the tail end of a great shift in pronunciation that started around the time of Chaucer. So spelling and pronunciation was still fairly fluid during Shakespeare's time.
The most interesting discussion I found about Shakespeare was "did he even exist? Was he French?" It was fun to entertain the idea and hear the arguments.
Interesting. At school I learned three sonnets by heart (had to) and found myself throughout my life almost always as the non-native who knew 100% more Shakespearean than every Brit I met.
If he invented these words, wouldn't his contemporaries wonder what he was on about? Apart from certain portmanteaux ("successful"), wasn't he simply recording the words in use? Due to the volume of his work, many newer words saw their first appearance in print. But he didn't "invent" them. He recorded how the language had evolved.
Or he was the first to use them a certain way (using a noun as a verb, adding suffixes or prefixes, etc). So he didn't exactly invent a lot of those, he just modified them.
I don't even think quite right either though. There's a real survivorship bias in play here, most people writing stuff down in his time will have had their works lost
None of Shakespeare's original writings survived. It was up to his colleagues to preserve the text after his death. How many other writers had writings that did not survive and were not preserved by third parties? Shakespeare is the most studied author of that era and perhaps of all time. He is the most cited in the OED. The use of a word in the works of Shakespeare will not be overlooked. The same cannot be said of lesser known authors, even if their works survived to the present day. Given all that, it's not surprising that so many words have Shakespeare as their first citation in the OED. We have no way of knowing how many were coined by Shakespeare, how many were coined by someone else whose works were lost to history, and how many coinages just haven't been uncovered yet.
On Kiss: I definitely remember that word in The Miller's Tale in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and that would have been long before Shakespeare's time. Slightly different spellings, sure, but no question of the lineage. Kisse instead of kiss and kiste instead of kissed. Totally agree: not a Shakespeare invention.
Humans are evolved to crave simplicity as our ancestral environments had little need of thought and a great need to save precious calories for exigencies. Consequently, we default to simple-mindedness. On one side, Shakespeare is an unparalleled genius with astonishing insight into the human psyche (he's not) and on the other he never even wrote the plays - tomorrow there will be someone babbling about how they were "really" written by aliens from another galaxy. In reality, Shakespeare was a talented and prolific writer who pushed theatre forward in the same way Mozart pushed opera forward and Beethoven pushed forward the string quartet repertoire. As you rightly point out, Shakespeare didn't do all the things he's credited with; but he very clearly did write important plays with great eloquence, which is why he, and not Bacon nor DeVere nor Marlowe nor even those space aliens from another galaxy were called "sweet master Shakespeare" by his contemporaries and it's why when his friends collected his plays and published them in folio form after his death none of those contemporaries rushed to claim the plays were "really" theirs. Conspiracy theories appeal to the simple-minded, but to few others.
Must give us pause. 🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨ "Before I start, I must see my end. Destination known, my mind’s journey now begins. Upon my chariot, heart and soul’s fate revealed. In time, all points converge, hope’s strength resteeled. But to earn final peace at the universe’s endless refrain, we must see all in nothingness... before we start again." 🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨ --Diamond Dragons (series)
Hot take: Shakespeare maybe was "just" the first one to write all those words down. Maybe they were commonly used, but only around "common" folk; maybe no one who went to university back then dared to actually write them down? And by doing so as the first one, Shakespeare hit a nerve and also legitimized the usage of those words?
2:55 when you buy a bigger bed, you have more bedroom but less bedroom
Very good 👏
More bedroom but less bed-roome.
This checks out scientifically, I checked and chuckled.
A joke I heard (or read) many decades ago went something like: "Oh I read Shakespeare, I don't know why people give him so much credit, he just seems to have strung together a bunch of well known sentences"
Hahaha
Not only that, but they were all well known letters and punctuation. He copied all of them from earlier writers!
I can’t believe Shakespeare wrote the script for this video 425 years ago just for you Rob
His name is Shakee
Maybe he paid a visit to Nostradamus who told him all about UA-cam.
even the channel name sounds like what shakespear may have done.
@@NathansWargames It's clearly much older. Does not the Bible tell us, _in the beginning was the Rob-Word?_
For some reason my brain came up with the phrase "Cambrian explosion of English" to describe the Elizabethan Era and I love it
He wrote 2 political plays - "Love, Labour's Lost" and "Love, Labour's Won".
😂
Maybe 3, how about 'The Comedy of Errors'
"Être ou ne pas être : telle est la question" Shakespeare en français ! Votre chaîne est absolument fantastique. J'adore vos vidéos et, surtout, votre sens de l'humour. Merci et à la revoyure. Et vive Shakespeare 🙂
Even though Shakespeare's works have become high brow culture, I've often felt that he was really a person who wrote for the common people. His plays were considered popular entertainment in his time, not stuffy and sophisticated as they are sometimes presented these days. With that in mind, I've often thought that given his unremarkable upbringing and education, he probably used words and expressions that he heard around him, so many of the new words that appear in print for the first time may well have been in common use when he was writing and so he really didn't invent a lot of these words, he simply was the first, or among the first, to put them to paper.
Thank you. You made my point but much more eloquently.
The past tense of William Shakespeare is Wouldiwas Shookspeared.
Shakespeare, if he is anything like me, must have had such an interest in people, full stop. He must have been listening, always, and holding on to what he heard around him. How else does one learn to embody so many types of characters with a single quill?
And he faithfully recorded the language, full of new words he didn't invent.
So his use of “bedroom” was possibly a pun.
As a Dutchie, I was surprised when you said that "to rant" is from Dutch. I looked op "ranten" and it is not in the Van Dale online dictionary. We should use it again
"...the snoggy Anglo-saxons..." I think I have a new favorite adjective-noun paring, thanks.
i'm starting to get the impression that "sib" is for ones that're older or equal age to you, and sibLING is for the little ones
So an old version of bro?
The thing I've heard a lot of lately is that as English as a whole was rapidly evolving during that period, many of Shakespeare's new words are more likely words that had started being used by young people of the era than actually being invented by him. Or in other words, that Shakespeare was using contemporary slang in his plays and happens to be the first person to have recorded them.
I feel like you didn't give du weight to the possibility that some (or many) of the words could have been in use in the spoken language around him already. Crediting it all to him directly seems a bit unfounded, though I'm sure he came up with quite a few on his own as well. Though potentially being the first to commit thousands of new words to text is still very impressive. Great video overall though, learned a lot :)
Was my thought as well. Rob briefly uses the phrase “first used in print” but I do believe this deserves greater scrutiny.
Were you watching the same video as me? Rob makes it quite clear that any number of these words were used in common parlance prior to Shakespeare fiddling with them to produce a variety of neologisms, thus broadening the meaning of the original.
I watched this on patreon yesterday and here I am watching the whole thing again. Excellent video.
I love your channel, Professor Dr. Mr. Words. Stay awesome!!
The issue here is mostly "invention", since anyone can add or remove an affixe. The time frame also helped (the invention of the printing press, the low literacy, etc.) so he did write them down and popularise them, no proof he didn't heard them by someone else. something we'll never know.
I think all these 'new words' had been in popular use before they entered into Shakey's plays. After all, the audiences of these plays were common everyday working people and they would not have paid money to hear words they didn't understand.
In the same token, Beethoven did not invent the symphony and Mozart did not invent the string quartet; they merely perfected the pre-existing music forms.
True, but considering that they are also counting things like adding un- before a word or -ing after it. Or using an existing word in a slightly new way. Most of them were not just introduced from nowhere. It was often more like wordplay and the audience would’ve recognized it as such.
I like the comedy series "Upstart Crow" It's a hilarious take on a lot of these stories and rumors around Shakespeare. David Mitchell as Will is wonderful!
I love all things David Mitchell! I’ll have to check it out.
Even if he didn't coin all these words, he was undeniably creative and clever with his play with existing words. "Bedroom" in this case is such an interesting play of words in this situation.
Thank you for calling the idea that Shakespeare didn't write his plays a conspiracy theory. It is. All the references to him not being capable make me think of Benjamin Franklin. He was a business man, writer, scientist, organizer, diplomat, but he was only a son of a poor candlemaker, never went to a university, and had a common law wife who he impregnated after restarting their relationship after her husband ran off. Deborah Franklin who was not well educated (likely due to the times she lived in and her family) never went to Europe (possibly due to fear of sea) and died before 1776.
As for the positive assertion that someone else wrote the plays, there is no direct proof. No manuscripts for Shakespeare writings in any of the candidates' papers.
Regarding skepticism that a man of Shakespeare’s background couldn’t have been the greatest writer in the English language: people point out that there was only one Enlightenment Philosophe who was famous both in the sciences and in letters, and that is Benjamin Franklin: a runaway indentured servant who started out with nothing. Commentators have also pointed out that the American president who was the most talented writer was Abraham Lincoln, born in a frontier cabin and without even completing an elementary education. Genius is often sui generous.
My American ears can't distinguish when Rob is speaking normally and when he's doing an Early Modern English accent. Haha!
16:53 lmao Rob that was awesome 😂 nice work on those phrases one after the other
Shakespeare wouldd be proud - and a bit jealous too
I've often wondered, with the IT revolution, how many words have we coined in our time (and how many will outlive the era of their coining)?
If you take the hundred years from 1920 to 2019, I bet it's in the thousands.
I've tried to thing of something, but just got a 404 error. Actually, this would make a great RobWords episode.
Traditional terms in IT have repurposed words like compile, run, open, close, file. The other terms that have leaked from their IT usage would be: bug (initially an engineering term), debug, boot, bandwidth, and references to a version number of an item (e.g. my exercise plan 2.0). I've seen a UA-camr use instantiate in a sentence not related to programming, but that could a repurposed word too. There are probably many others.
@@palmercolson7037 And "computer" itself - used to be a job title for a human.
I think we will lose more than we gain because high schoolers/college students are not learning Greek and Latin where our more nuanced words come from. They also are not reading enough Shakespeare to get lots of the Anglo-Saxon words.
@homeonegreen9 try reading through a newspaper or article and highlight any words than seem new and then look them up. It's a fun exercise
Rob you’re my favourite UA-camr. Etymology and language are my special interests as an autistic person. I watch all of your videos.
The Shakespeare Folio came out in 1624, including many new works and revisions to old ones. You need your search parameter to go to 1624 otherwise you will not get a good count.
Alternate title: Was Shakey A Fakie?
You mean alternative?
@@trevorcook4439You mean Alternie?
Shakespeare to Marlowe: Stop trying to make "Fetch" happen.
Is this a swagger I see before me? Such self-confidence must be an end to a reckoning, surely.
RobsWords video? That's an instant click.
Video about shakespeare? That's an instant click.
RobsWords video about shakespeare? You better believe that's an instant click.
Clough suggested an Exchange on the Antwerp model in 1562, and Gresham founded The Royal Exchange in 1571(opened and sponsored by Queen Elizabeth ). This would bring a lot of European merchants to the City - which is walking distance from Southwark ( I know, I’ve worked there enough….). It’s almost like easy trade makes for artistic growth…..
My favourite book about Shakespeare is Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage.
If Shakespeare used hundreds of new i.e. unknown words, it would have been as incomprehensible to his audience then as it is to most of us today!
Technically they weren't "new" but the first time they appeared in print. So they could have been in everyday speach but never written down before.
@@bobwightman1054 or more correctly, survived in text until to day
Well, when you account for the fact that quite a few of them are merely new Derivative Forms, rather than Entirely new words, nor new, contextually clear, usages for existing words, and then you realise that all of them are spread out over 40-ish works so the audience isn't running into them all at once...
And then, yes, all the words where they're new in the sense that it's the first time they appear in texts that survived long enough for anyone to make record of them rather than the first time they were ever used at all mitigates the issue still further.
Also, a large part of how incomprehensible so many people today find Shakespere (though certainly not the Entirity of it!) has more to do with their poor skills in Present Day English, even before getting into compensating for a couple of centuries of linguistic drift. ... That and the fact that it's all written in Script format, intended to be read aloud and Heard, not to mention written largely as poetry which further doubles down on that, so trying to understand it just from silently reading the text, rather than properly Performing it, is something of a struggle.
@@laurencefraser Exactly so.
"Yo all prolly won't get it, but fellas in a few hundred years will say it's lit as f."
- Shakespeare, probably
Just starting the video, so idk if it'll be mentioned or not, but..
My fave alledged Shakey coined word is: SWAGGER
Mostly bc of how it's used these days lol
Another majestic video as ever Rob!
By far my favourite channel on UA-cam, as are your podcasts with Jess.
Hope you have a lovely weekend.
9:40 this is the second time I've been legitimately tempted by a skill share subscription
Good ad Rob
One idea that I love about Shakespeare is he had a Great teacher who he loved. Most of his sonnets are love poems to his teacher.
"Top Hole old thing" as Lord Peter Wimsey might have said.. enjoyed it lots.
You must have worked so hard to produce this. Thank you.
Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets in the same way that Trevithick, with little formal educations, invented the steam locomotive. Many of the parts were there for both men,but both made use of them in new ways.
I have really enjoyed Shakespeare since high school, where I was introduced to him. It's amazing to me that his comedies are still funny today. Timeless. Like Lucille Ball.
English is probably the most spoken word around the Globe (theatre).
If English is widespread worldwide, it is because of English imperialism, not because English drama is supposedly superior to the rest
@@Mazorca-qq3li and your point is? Because you obviously missed the joke I was making.
@@Mazorca-qq3li Nah bro, everything England is eternally best. The planet is just coping with it.
6:33 -- Might this have been a pun on "gossip" turning into "go sip", in other words, take a few sips of something strong?
My thoughts exactly.
Everyone knows that, according to the Monty Python sketch; "Stake Your Claim", it was contestant Franz Schultz that wrote all of Shakespeare's plays, and that he and his wife wrote all the sonnets.
Facts, Rob, Facts!
(Schultz later returns to declare that he wanted to be a lumberjack - cue music...)
Shakespeare walks into a pub. The barman bellows at him "get out, you're bard". Thank you, I'm here all week.
You have a nerdy kind of charm. Definitely worth listening to you.
14:12 in old French, they also use relate for say: “relater”
Things are known for the last person to find a thing, not the first.
Imagine finding a handwritten draft of one of his plays..... I can't imagine how much that would go for at the auction block!
It's seems obvious that his writing of these words were the first ones that survived. The oldest photo I have of myself is not the first one taken.
Everytime I see Shakespeare's name, I remember the fact who also wrote his name as something like "William Jacque Spear" And I think that might be the most likely version.
This is exactly what I've always thought when told Bill the Shakes coined all those words.
Sounds like having to stick within a meter, lead to innovation. Limit leading to creativity! 15:42 haha you said a version of this literally as I wrote this
This reminds me a French word "invented" (popularised, actually) by Victor Hugo. Yes, only one word! The word is "pieuvre", which means octopus. The word is originaly from the Channel islands, where Hugo was exiled. He used it in his novel Toilers of the Sea, and the word soon became more popular than the previous word ("poulpe", which is still in use).
why didst thou leave me lingering so long for this wondrous video, good RobWords?
I think a video on the Shakespeare veneration that started in the 19th century would be an interesting topic.
I've always thought Shakespeare is great euphemism.
15:45 I feel like the rigorous metre of iambic pentameter, & the desire to entertain with wordplay is what funnels Shakespeare into writing each of these words in novel ways.
I feel like while we should give credit where it's due -- we should both talk about the nuances of evidence about what Shakespeare wrote alone (still great feats), which he plagiarized, which he collaborated on with ghost writers who couldn't publish back then, etc -- while we do that we should also reframe Shakespeare less as a great individual, but rather as the archetype of the intellectual and artistic upheavals of the time
Many of these words are also being used just in public, by humanity, whether speaking English, French, etc so you can think of "Shakespeare" rather as a symbol of collective lexical production rather than a mere person, and also rather than an isolated genius "great man".
20:00 regarding classism: being such a prolific wordsmith would probably be *aided* and even *required* by 1. Not having the obscure academic grammar 2. Having both the vulgar masses and the erudite/at least literate gentry as your audience 3. Once again, making yourself rhyme & speak in iambic pentameter.
Even I, a lowly scientific writer, have coined a few neologisms in my time. My personal favourite was “ouroborosly” to describe a field of research so self obsessed it was eating itself. I can believe the 1700 figure, creating new words is fun 😁
Shaky... This is how not-Blackadder calle Shakespeare in the famous sketch starring Mr. Atkinson & Mr. Laurie... "To be a victim of all the earthly woes or not to be a coward and take Death by his proffered hand" "I'm sure we can get that down!"
Shaky (Shakey?) is certainly acceptable, but I'm not at all confident that it tops Big Willie Shakes.
Thanks, Rob! I suppose I should say _I thank you,_ instead; sounds a bit more Shakespearean that way :D
As a kid we called Shakespeare 'Waggle Dagger'!
I called him wave sword
Wigglesword was ours.
4:20 I mean, one way to confirm that would be if there is a cognate in other Germanic languages. And there are!
German: küssen
Dutch: kussen
Danish: kysse
Swedisch: kyssa
Norwegian: kysse/kyssa
Icelandic: kyssa
It's not the verb "kiss" that Will is supposed to have invented, but the conjugation "kissing" that had never been written down before, but Rob contends must have been said by people, without being told how to by Shakespeare.
@@PopeLando Ooh, I see. Sorry, my mistake.
I don't know why, but seeing that guy in the background around 13:50 creeped me out
That's a tree.
@@karlkarlos3545 Nope, bloke in a long black coat. Might be smoking.
His read name was Shakie Stevens.
I hath fallen on my garden path, when I awoke, I found a slug between mine shoulder blades
@roBWords I always have wondered why some English native speakers put an r sound after idea and some other worfd. Could you please make an episode shedding some light on this phenomenon?
0:09 that was cleverly done!
The KJV 1611 would have also had a huge influence on that time period being so prolific.
Both it and Shakespeare's writings were constantly adapted for over a hundred years... we should have continued that process.
I just had a right 'Twilight Zone' moment.
On my home feed on the TV, this vid, with your face was right next to a vid about David Coote, THAT ref! 😮
Thought I was seeing things😱
It's also true that this fertile time for the English language was the era of William Tindale, the authors of the Geneva Bible and (just within Shakespeare's lifetime) the King James Bible of 1611.
Read “The Truth Will Out” by Brenda James!!! Super interesting even if you don’t agree with her conclusions.
Is it possible that because he was writing dialogues in plays representing spoken exchanges rather than writing in a fixed 'classic' reading text that wasnt far removed from an era of latin only/exclusive/religious/monkish books. It stands out in his work compared to other texts from that time, like letters (writing by literate people) or 'official' publications (that were corrected before printing)
Interesting. Well done
I always felt that if he had invented words and just included them without definition, how would anyone understand what was going on? I often wondered if a lot his inventions were just the first recorded use of words already in use.
I thought you were going to talk about the Richard III fallacies :( The Richard III Society is a great resource, but I always like to hear other takes on the subject.
We are being lied to. All the Shakespeare plays were written by Truman Capote.
People mention also that the few fragments of handwriting we have that are attributed to shakespeare aren't consistent in spelling. Like, we have examples of Shakespeare's signature and he spells his own name differently each time. THis is so called 'proof' that Shakespeare really was a nearly illiterate bumpkin. Thing is, when Shakespeare was writing, the English language was at the tail end of a great shift in pronunciation that started around the time of Chaucer. So spelling and pronunciation was still fairly fluid during Shakespeare's time.
You’ve done it again, Rob, at one fell swoop.
The most interesting discussion I found about Shakespeare was "did he even exist? Was he French?" It was fun to entertain the idea and hear the arguments.
Interesting. At school I learned three sonnets by heart (had to) and found myself throughout my life almost always as the non-native who knew 100% more Shakespearean than every Brit I met.
If he invented these words, wouldn't his contemporaries wonder what he was on about? Apart from certain portmanteaux ("successful"), wasn't he simply recording the words in use? Due to the volume of his work, many newer words saw their first appearance in print. But he didn't "invent" them. He recorded how the language had evolved.
So if he invented 1700 - 9450 words does that suggest that people didn't understand his plays (without studing them) even when they were contemporary?
Conclusion: Shakespeare didn't invent all those words, most of the time he is just the first person to write them down
Or he was the first to use them a certain way (using a noun as a verb, adding suffixes or prefixes, etc). So he didn't exactly invent a lot of those, he just modified them.
I don't even think quite right either though. There's a real survivorship bias in play here, most people writing stuff down in his time will have had their works lost
1700 new words? I just wonder how his audiences felt about this deluge of new words in their entertainment.
Shakespeare was a group of writers. Someone with influence said that he was good and rest if the world followed.
Maybe?
“Zounds” is pronounced “ZOO-nds”? I always thought it was “ZOW-nds”.
It's a contraction of "God's wounds"
None of Shakespeare's original writings survived. It was up to his colleagues to preserve the text after his death. How many other writers had writings that did not survive and were not preserved by third parties?
Shakespeare is the most studied author of that era and perhaps of all time. He is the most cited in the OED. The use of a word in the works of Shakespeare will not be overlooked. The same cannot be said of lesser known authors, even if their works survived to the present day.
Given all that, it's not surprising that so many words have Shakespeare as their first citation in the OED. We have no way of knowing how many were coined by Shakespeare, how many were coined by someone else whose works were lost to history, and how many coinages just haven't been uncovered yet.
Is it sad that I only knew about Loves Labors Won because of Doctor Who?
Love these videos!
"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon" ... forgot where its from exactly in Star Trek
So the first use of bedroom was not in a room and there wasn't a bed. Hmm.
On Kiss: I definitely remember that word in The Miller's Tale in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and that would have been long before Shakespeare's time. Slightly different spellings, sure, but no question of the lineage. Kisse instead of kiss and kiste instead of kissed. Totally agree: not a Shakespeare invention.
Humans are evolved to crave simplicity as our ancestral environments had little need of thought and a great need to save precious calories for exigencies. Consequently, we default to simple-mindedness. On one side, Shakespeare is an unparalleled genius with astonishing insight into the human psyche (he's not) and on the other he never even wrote the plays - tomorrow there will be someone babbling about how they were "really" written by aliens from another galaxy. In reality, Shakespeare was a talented and prolific writer who pushed theatre forward in the same way Mozart pushed opera forward and Beethoven pushed forward the string quartet repertoire. As you rightly point out, Shakespeare didn't do all the things he's credited with; but he very clearly did write important plays with great eloquence, which is why he, and not Bacon nor DeVere nor Marlowe nor even those space aliens from another galaxy were called "sweet master Shakespeare" by his contemporaries and it's why when his friends collected his plays and published them in folio form after his death none of those contemporaries rushed to claim the plays were "really" theirs. Conspiracy theories appeal to the simple-minded, but to few others.
Very interesting. Thanks!
Must give us pause.
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
"Before I start, I must see my end. Destination known, my mind’s journey now begins. Upon my chariot, heart and soul’s fate revealed. In time, all points converge, hope’s strength resteeled. But to earn final peace at the universe’s endless refrain, we must see all in nothingness... before we start again."
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
--Diamond Dragons (series)
Hot take: Shakespeare maybe was "just" the first one to write all those words down. Maybe they were commonly used, but only around "common" folk; maybe no one who went to university back then dared to actually write them down? And by doing so as the first one, Shakespeare hit a nerve and also legitimized the usage of those words?
Very interesting!