FIVE THINGS ABOUT THE BARD

1

DICTIONARY BIAS

William Shakespeare has been wrongly credited with inventing several words and phrases because of the Oxford English Dictionary’s “bias” towards citing literary examples of early usages, an Australian expert has said.

2

SEARCHES OF OLD TEXT

David McInnis, a lecturer in Shakespeare studies at Melbourne University, said online searches of old texts had helped to uncover pre-Shakespeare uses for many words and phrases that are frequently credited to him.

3

‘WILD GOOSE CHASE’

“It was Greek to me” was thought to have first appeared in Julius Caesar, but examples of the phrase’s use appear in playwright Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James the Fourth. “A wild goose chase”: The OED cites Romeo and Juliet as the first use of the expression, but a few years earlier, English poet Gervase Markham published a book on horsemanship that contained the saying. “Eaten out of house and home” was thought to originate in Henry IV Part 2, but was used more than 10 years prior by Philip Caesar writing about the sin of usury.

4

NO BIG SURPRISE

This doesn’t strike McInnis as surprising. “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.”

5

33,000 QUOTATIONS

McInnis 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. “Frequently we can find earlier uses that the Oxford English Dictionary simply hasn’t cited yet.”