We’ve taken a little leeway with nautical matters in adding to our lexicon
Q. How did WCopyfind, software typically used to detect plagiarism, help illuminate inspiration for some of William Shakespeare’s plays? A. Of course, researcher Dennis McCarthy and English professor June Schlueter are not suggesting that William Shakespeare plagiarized, writes Michael Blanding in the “New York Times,” but rather that the Bard read and was inspired by an unpublished manuscript (“A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels”) written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth.
Combining WCopyfind and literary analysis, McCarthy and Schlueter conclude that Shakespeare likely consulted North’s manuscript to write 11 plays, including “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III” and “Henry V.” Their focus was common words and phrases: For example, in the manuscript’s dedication, North urged those who see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, using words like “proportion,” “glass,” “feature,” “deformed” and others. In the opening soliloquy of Richard III, “the hunchback tyrant uses the same words in virtually the same order to come to the opposite conclusion: that since he is outwardly ugly, he will act the villain he appears to be.”
Says McCarthy, “People don’t realize how rare these words really are.”
Further, Shakespeare uses the same words as North in scenes about similar themes: North uses six terms for dogs, including “trundletail,” to argue that “just as dogs exist in a natural hierarchy, so do humans. Shakespeare uses essentially the same list of dogs to make similar points in ‘King Lear’ and ‘Macbeth.’” Searching the database Early English Books Online (1473-1700), McCarthy found that “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before 1623. Q. What animal, like humans, mates for life and may overindulge in alcohol? A. elephants B. parrots C. prairie voles D. wolves A. Surprisingly, it’s prairie voles (C), since they’re one of the few mammals that form long-term monogamous pairs and willingly drinks alcohol, reports “New Scientist” magazine.
Andrey Ryabinin and Andre Walcott of Oregon Health and Science University knew that divorce rates increase among couples who are “discordant drinkers” (one a heavy drinker, the other not) and wondered whether studying prairie voles might offer a reason why. Starting with pairbonded voles, the researchers gave them either water, or alcohol and water, then offered the voles a choice between their own partner or a new mate. Their findings: “Males tended to stick by their partners if both had drunk similar amounts of alcohol. But if only the male had been drinking, he was more likely to mate with a stranger.”
But more research is needed since factors other than discordant drinking may be at work here. Stay tuned. Q. The following may be familiar to you, but did you know they’re all nautical lingo: “leeway,” “flotsam,” “jetsam,” and “copper-bottomed.” Can you explain their origins and their current metaphorical meanings? A. Let’s get underway, shall we? “Leeway” means “freedom to do something” and stems from the sideways drift of a ship to leeward, away from the wind, says Anu Garg on his A.Word.A.Day web site. “Flotsam” and “jetsam” are often paired together, the first meaning “people or things considered useless or unimportant,” the second “discarded material.” In nautical terminology, “flotsam” was “goods found floating after a shipwreck,” while “jetsam,” an alteration of “jettison,” referred to “goods thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress.” Next, “copper-bottomed,” suggesting “reliable, genuine or trustworthy,” stems from the practice of covering a ship’s hull with copper to protect it from wear.