Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (28 page)

Although Macrone has found some terms that predate the
OED
, there are words on his list that have been taken away from Shakespeare in the third edition of the dictionary dated September 2007. One of these words is
puke
because of several earlier uses.
Puke (along with its first cousins
barf, hurl,
and
upchuck
) is an onomatopoetic word that likely came out of taverns and inns where overindulgence was common. The word
zany
(the last on Macrone’s list) was predated in an earlier version of the
OED
.

On the other hand, there are words that do not appear in Macrone’s list and other lists that are “one-offs” that did not become part of the larger language and languish on the back burner of common speech.

Do these count?

There are those who have made a case for them. In
The Shakespeare Key
by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, a book published in 1879, this appeal appears:

SHAKESPEARE, with the right and might of a true poet, and with his peculiar royal privilege as king of all poets, has minted several words that deserve to become current in our language. He coined them for his own special use to express his own special meanings in his own special passages; but they are so expressive and so well framed to be exponents of certain particulars in meaning common to us all, that they deserve to become generally adopted and used.

The Clarkes nominate for general adoption:

affin’d
= united by affinity

attask’d
= taken to task

cadent
= falling, trickling, pouring down

co-mart
= joint bargains, compact made together, in the same manner that the words co-heiress, co-partner, &c.

congreeing
= agreeing with itself, in all its parts

congreeted
= greeted each other, met together

dispunge
= discharge as from a sponge

fracted
= broken

germins
= the principles of germination

immoment
= unmomentous, of no moment or importance

insisture
= fixed position, appointed situation, steadfast place

intrenchant
= incapable of being cut

mirable =
wonderful, that which is to be admired at, or marvelled at

needly
= needfully, necessarily

oppugnancy
= warring opposition

propugnation
= power of defense

roted
= retained by rote; acquired by rote and held ready for conventional utterance and

unsisting
= unstill, never resting
⁸

Finally, Shakespeare was able to take existing words and fashion them into other forms of speech.

As lexicographer Rob Kyff pointed out in one of his syndicated columns on words entitled “Don’t Guilt People for Verbing Nouns”: “ William Shakespeare was the first to use ‘champion’ as a verb, ‘scuffle’ as a noun, ‘hush’ as an adjective (‘hush money’) and ‘accused’ as a noun (‘the accused’).”
⁹
Even if these adaptations were first made by the Bard (which they probably were not) do they count in the total?

Then there are the extended phrases—metaphors, similes, and aphorisms—which are often listed as coinages. In
Shakespeare on Toast
, Ben Crystal rattles off many of these, including: “
laughing yourself into stitches, setting your teeth on edge, not sleeping a wink, being cruel only to be kind,
and
playing fast and loose
.”
¹⁰
British comedian and sometimes Shakespearean actor Lenny Henry noted in a 2012 essay in the
Evening Standard
entitled “What Will Taught Me”: “The first thing I’ve learned about the Bard is that you may think you’re keeping him at arm’s length but his phrases crop up all over the English language. Things you thought your parents had made up were actually first coined by Bill Shakestick.”

Henry goes on to list a number of them beginning with the letter A: “A sorry sight”; “All corners of the world”; “All that glitters is not gold”; “As pure as the driven snow”; “At one fell swoop.” He noted later in the essay that when his dad ran for the bus in the morning he would say, “Let slip the dogs of war”—a Bardism.

The question of Shakespeare’s word count was put to John F. Andrews, founder and president of the Shakespeare Guild, whose lifetime of Shakespearean scholarship netted him, among other honors, the Order of the British Empire in the year 2000.

“Like you, I suspect,” he wrote in reply to my query, “I’d love to think that Shakespeare introduced a good deal more than 500 of the words that remain in today’s dictionaries. But since our print and manuscript records from his time, and even more from the periods that preceded it, are so scant, there is really no way of knowing.”

Andrews, whose Shakespearean credits are legion, has worked on restoring Shakespeare’s scripts to their earliest forms. He added this: “One thing I’d note, however, is that a good number of what may well be Bardic coinages have been obliterated by later editors, who’ve been emending the original quarto and folio texts almost from the outset, and particularly from the early 18th century to the present. A word such as
beguide
, for example, which appears in the 1604–5 second quarto of
Hamlet
, and which strikes me as an authentically Polonian hybrid that merges ‘beguile’ and ‘misguide,’ survives only in the small-print notes of modern editions of the plays. And, trust me, there are scores of similar instances. One of my favorites is
envie
, a form that appears in the line ‘Is it for him you do envie me so?’  in
The Taming of the Shrew
. Here the meter calls for a stress on the first syllable, and the context makes it clear that Bianca means ‘vie with’ primarily, and ‘envy’ in the usual sense only secondarily.”
*
¹¹

So there it is—a number that is no easier to determine than the number of birds in a given tract of parkland on a given day at a given time.

*
Another example of this phenomenon is pointed out in Jeffrey McQuain and Stanley Malless: “Shakespeare uses pander as a verb only once, and that use occurs in
Hamlet
. As Hamlet accuses his mother of complicity in his father’s murder, he suggests that her motive was lust, by which ‘reason panders will’ (III.iv.88). Although the quarto editions substitute pardons, the First Folio chooses panders.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tom Mann of the Library of Congress for his help with this book. Special thanks also to the staff of the Rare Books and Special Collections of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, which houses the Louis E. Kahn Collection of Dictionaries, which was most useful in compiling this collection. I would also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to fellow author Bill Young for his help with this book and for his pioneering work as a:

Placoanagrammist
noun.
(/plæko
?
æn
?
g
ræmest/) [From the Greek
placo
(flat plate or tablet) + ana (anew) +
gram
(something written) +
ist
.] A person who develops anagrams of people’s names suitable to be engraved on their tombstones as epitaphs.

I am also indebted to John F. Andrews, OBE, founder and president of the Shakespeare Guild for his advice on dealing with Shakespeare’s neologic box score and to John M. Morse of Merriam-Webster for his work on coming up with the consensus term for Shakespeare’s 450th. Also thanks to Rev. David Baverstock and Richard Lederer for their help in the quest for the proper term. Amatoli Etzioini, John Denis Huston, Joseph C. Goulden, Phyllis Richman, Bob Skole, and Jim Srodes.

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———.
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———.
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