Shakespeare was the original Word Nerd. Through the endless translations of his work, he’s made an indelible mark not only on the literary world, but on our everyday language.
Some of the now common words that first appeared in his works are such gems as “obscene,” “leapfrog,” “elbow,” “premeditated,” “horrid,” “vast,” and “courtship.” Imagine, if you please, an English without “puppy-dog” or “thin air,” or without the famous “to be or not to be” and “wherefore art thou Romeo” speeches.
Take these away and you take away a sizable portion of our language’s vocabulary and character. Undoubtedly, it’s for reasons such as these that Shakespeare is considered one of the greats.
But even the greats can be excessive. The true extent of his verbosity can be summed up in Act 5, Scene 1 of “Love’s Labour Lost,” when he carelessly throws in the word “honorificabilitudinatibus”—say that six times fast—a mock-Latin word carrying the embarrassingly simple definition of “with honour.”
But even in the process of creating his most daunting words, Shakespeare was just goofing off:combining, creating, inverting, and toying with words in every which way—kind of like a three-year-old playing with his older brother’s Lego. One of Shakespeare’s hidden triumphs was that while writing some of the greatest poetry of the English language, he was just having fun. So to the greatest poet of the English language, I propose a toast. To Shakespeare—honorificabilitudinatibus.
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