The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

Lacking the university education that mattered a lot to the dedicated poets of fashion, Shakespeare had to be outstandingly responsive to poetry and to fashion, and he was. It appears that he was well aware of the Inkhorn Controversy and, as usual, he waded in. He used new words which had appeared from the middle to the end of the sixteenth century, like “multitudinous,” “emulate,” “demonstrate,” “dislocate,” “initiate,” “meditate” and “allurement,” “eventful,” “horrid,” “modest” and “vast.” He invented and was also very fond of composite words: “canker-sorrow,” “widow-comfort,” “bare-pick’t,” “halfe-blowne.” Some, like “dislocate,” “horrid” and “vast,” are first recorded in Shakespeare. On the other hand, he could back losers too. Everyday language might sound rather different if we were saying “appertainments,” “cadent,” “questrist,” “tortive,” “abruption,” “perisive,” “ungenitured,” “unplausive” or “vastidity.” His longest word, “honorificabilitudinatibus,” which means “with honour,” has also fallen out of fashion. He ransacked everywhere for words. He used his own Midlands dialect to bring in regional words like “baton,” which means cudgel, “batlet,” which was still used around Stratford-upon-Avon until the mid twentieth century to mean the bat to beat clothes in the wash; there’s “keck” for “fool’s parsley” and “honeystalks” for “white clover”; “mobled” for “muffled”; “gallow” from “gally” — to frighten — and “geck” for “a fool.” He wrote: “Golden lads and girls all m...