Just whose line was that, anyway?
Phrases existed before Shakespeare made them famous, expert says
Shakespeare has been wrongly credited with inventing several words and phrases because of the Oxford English Dictionary’s “bias” toward citing literary examples of early usages, an Australian expert says.
Noting examples such as “it was Greek to me” and “wild-goose chase,” David McInnis, from Melbourne University, said online searches of old texts have helped to uncover pre-Shakespeare uses for many words and phrases that are frequently credited to him.
“Did Shakespeare really invent all these words and phrases?” he wrote in an article for the university’s online magazine. “The short answer is no. His audiences had to understand at least the gist of what he meant, so his words were mostly in circulation already or were logical combinations of pre-existing concepts.”
McInnis, a lecturer in Shakespeare studies, said the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 33,000 quotations from Shakespeare, including about 1,500 listed as the first evidence of a word’s existence. A further 7,500 are listed as the first evidence of a particular usage or meaning.
“But the OED is biased,” McInnis wrote. “Especially in the early days, it preferred literary examples, and famous ones at that.
“The Complete Works of Shakespeare was frequently raided for early examples of word use, even though words or phrases might have been used earlier, by less famous or less literary people.”
However, McInnis noted that Shakespeare sometimes appears to have refashioned existing phrases — such as “the better part of valour is discretion” — to make them “concise and catchy.”
And, in other cases, such as “to make an ass of oneself,” Shakespeare “seems to have genuinely invented (it),” McInnis wrote.
“So did Shakespeare really invent all those words?” he asked. “No, not really.
“He invented some; more usually he came up with the most memorable combinations or uses; and frequently we can find earlier uses that the Oxford English Dictionary simply hasn’t cited yet.”