Contributions to the language

Bill Bryson

Those who love the English language will enjoy Bill Bryson's Shakespeare as much as those who love William Shakespeare. (Of course, these are usually the same people.) That is because Bryson tells us a lot about Shakespeare's contribution to the language, which was considerable.

Shakespeare created hundreds of words in his plays. Often he would just turn nouns into verbs or add an un- prefix to an existing word. But just as often he created entirely new words such as dwindle, frugal, vast, lonely and critical. It might be difficult to write a page of text in English without using at least one word Shakespeare invented.

Then too there are the many phrases, now cliches, that are familiar to us all: cold comfort, to thine own self be true, pomp and circumstance, flesh and blood, foul play, etc. This says a lot about the popularity of Shakespeare's plays over the years — the popularity of The Godfather and Casablanca has also given us several memorable phrases — but it is mostly an indication of his gift for language.

The King James Bible, produced in England during this same period of history, also blessed us with an amazing number of now-familiar phrases. But Bryson mentions another contribution from this Bible translation that few of us would think of: it helped to standardize spelling. In Shakespeare's day, those who could write were free to spell any word any way they chose, even their own names. Shakespeare rarely signed his own name the same way twice, and he never spelled it the way we spell it today. The King James Bible established a standard that others would follow, bringing conformity to a written language that heretofore had none.

Elsewhere Bryson lists some of the words used to designate certain types of criminals in 16th and 17th century London. Pickpockets were called foists. Hookers were not what you might think but rather people who snatched desirable goods from open windows with hooks. Swindlers were called coney catchers. There were also whipjacks, fingerers, courtesy men and the like.