Online Searching Proves Shakespeare Ripped Off Words and Phrases
September 16, 2016
Original phrases? Bah. Neologisms? Poppycock. William Shakespeare, like Mozart, ripped off other people. Imagine that. Listening to people, noting interesting turns of phrases, and learning new words from those around him. Where was the DCMA and copyright when we really needed them?
I read “The Game Is Up: Shakespeare’s Language Not As Original As Dictionaries Think.” My first reaction was, “Do dictionaries think?” I thought dictionaries were compilations of the work of individuals who chased down the meanings of words. Who am I but a lonely recluse in rural Kentucky? I know that real journalists know much more about dictionaries than I. So think they do.
But the guts of the story is that a person working at a university ran online queries across the digitized text of early British texts. Guess what? When running a query for the phrase “It’s Greek to me”,
the academic points out that searching for it in the digital resource Early English Books Online throws up its usage in Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James the Fourth, printed in 1598 but possibly written in 1590.
Who said Shakespeare was a wordsmithing genius? The answer, gentle reader, are those folks who compile dictionaries.
But that’s not the only rip off performed by the guy who wrote plays loved by students the world over. He stole “wild goose chase.”
The article pointed out that the Bard seems to have saddled up his imagination and actually created the phrase “to make an ass of oneself.”
The repercussions from this discovery are significant. The lively and flexible editors of the Oxford English Dictionary will hop to making the necessary changes. I will have to replace my copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in due course. What if I learn that “wild goose chase” is not a coinage of a fellow suspected of being a closet Catholic.
Online is good for something. “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” No wonder creating a link is a violation of the law. If a recusant does not own up to the source, punishment is needed. Bad Sharkespeare.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2016
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
