WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WORD

I'm still recovering from the huge let-down over the revelation of that one millionth word.

Since Master Wm Shakespeare was vaguely implicated in the hoop-la surrounding what was, as it turned out, a non-event, it's worth remembering that the Bard of Avon coined (or, at least was the first to use in writing) a number of common-or-garden words (perhaps as many as 1,500) including abstemious, alligator, bedroom, eyeball, farmhouse, jaded, label, marketable, obscene, sanctimonious, tranquil and zany.

Personally, I doubt he actually 'made up' some of those. I mean, if he had, how would anyone in the audience at the Globe have known what Romeo was referring to when he talked about an apothecary in whose "needy shop a tortoise hung, / An alligator stuff'd, and other skins"; or what Prince Hal meant in calling Falstaff a "whoreson, obscene, greasy, tallow catch," although, in that instance, they'd probably have got the general drift!

However, the fact remains that Will's the lad to whom we can trace back the use of such words as 'employer', 'manager', 'investment', 'retirement', 'negotiate', 'petition', 'protesters' and 'violations'.

And he gave us such useful phrases as 'not budge an inch', 'green-eyed jealousy', 'eaten out of house and home', 'neither here nor there', 'to play fast and loose', 'to be tongue-tied', 'to be a tower of strength' or 'to knit your brows'.

Not to mention such everyday expressions 'a method in my madness', 'insist on fair play', 'make a virtue of necessity', 'stand on ceremony', 'too much of a good thing', 'seen better days' and 'living in a fool’s paradise'.

When we describe someone as 'a laughing stock', say something is 'a sorry sight', that we are 'in a pickle', or 'in stitches' and that something happened 'in the twinkling of an eye' we are, whether we know it or not, quoting Shakespeare.

He was even the man responsible for the phrase (spoken by Jack Cade in Henry VI) 'as dead as a doornail', that, centuries later, prompted another of Britain's great wordsmiths, Charles Dickens, to write...

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It's also worth noting that - for such an oft-quoted writer - Shakespeare was the first person to use the word 'misquote'!!

Cartoons: Court Jones and Cox & Forkum