I was trolling on Facebook the other day, and ran across this meme posted by our friend, Chip MacGregor.
I hope the words are clear enough for you to read.
Shakespeare didn’t just entertain us with poems, stories, hilarity, and villains–he added to our everyday language we’re familiar with today. On one website I found, it states the Bard supplied us with over 1700 words still in use today.
One I discovered is “addiction” from Henry V. The meaning as it was used then was “inclination” or “tendency”. Sound familiar?
I was wondering…can you add to this list? Let’s put our wordy heads together and come up with a few more, shall we?
The Bard . . . 4/23/1564-4/23/1616
He’s waiting . . .
Did you know the Bard was the first to use bedroom and lonely in the written word? I had no idea of those two or the others in the graphic! Fascinating.
Hi Patricia!
I didn’t either. It’d be interesting to time travel a couple thousand years ahead and see if the words and phrases we use will still be in use. I can almost imagine some future human trying to figure out what a facebook was… 🙂
Have a great day!
I’ve made up words for my science fiction, mostly nouns for very specific alien tech and ideas. My alien race looked human enough to have walked among us since the beginning of our history so I decided to smush together Latin words. The race was the “N’Videri, “the Never To Be Seen.” One of their swords is a “ferr’ignique,” a mix of thunder, lightning, and fire.
Weird Al Yankovich was asked why he no longer does parodies of music, and he mentioned how fragmented tastes are these days. There’s rarely a new hit that covers more than a few demographics. That’s a pretty good explanation of why we in modern fiction can’t create words and make them stick. JK Rowling has managed to put words like “hallows” back into the mainstream because her Harry Potter novels have now crossed a number of generations. The same can be said of STAR WARS and STAR TREK, but their words are franchise specific.
Hi Marilyn!
Speaking of Star Wars and Trek, the phrase “light sabre” comes to mind. Probably hasn’t been used in any other creative work, right?
Have a great day!
In elementary school, the teacher asked us to do this, blend words to come up with new ones. Being the imp that I was, I came up with Stumb Midiot. Stupid and dumb, moron and idiot. Turns out there’s a lot of them on the L.A. freeway system!
I love it, Jim.
I wish I’d had an assignment like that…but, knowing me, I’d have been grounded until next year.
Have a great weekend, my friend!