Roots
Play on words
Deepti

TWO sources have made a major contribution to the lexicon of English and these are: one, the Bible and, two, William Shakespeare.

When a work as ancient as the Bible passes through many versions and translations, original phrases and collocations are created at every stage and while they may not have been in common use earlier, once used in the Bible, these entries become a part of everyday vocabulary. From the Bible have come contributions like ‘eat, drink and be merry’, ‘the prodigal son’, ‘sweat of thy brow’, ‘the iron hath entered my soul’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘glad tidings’, ‘to kingdom come’ and ‘the fatted calf’. Words such as ‘babble’, ‘scapegoat’, ‘trespass’, tender-hearted’, ‘damsel’, ‘raiment’, ‘congregation’ and ‘unclean’ are also the gift of the Bible.

Shakespeare was a very language-conscious playwright, as can be seen from the innumerable puns in his plays. The language play in his works, especially his experiments with words from different dialects, added to the lexis of English. ‘Bump’ was used only in the spoken language before he used it in a play. ‘Castigate’, ‘gloomy’, ‘auspicious’ and ‘critic’ are words that he ‘borrowed’ from Latin and forgot to return.

Making use of the French prefixes ‘en’ and ‘em’, Shakespeare created a number of new words like ‘enact’, ‘embattle’ ‘endeared’, ‘enmesh’ and ‘embayed’, using already existing English words. Very innovatively, he joined adjectives to create poetic compounds like ‘daring-hardy’ and ‘happy-valiant’. He also used adjectives to make verbs as in ‘happy’ in the sense of ‘to make happy’ and ‘safe’ in the sense of ‘to make safe’. From nouns he created verbs such as ‘spanieled’ or ‘followed like a spaniel’ and ’ and ‘fathered’, both in one passage in King Lear. Although all of Shakespeare’s neologisms may not have reached the dictionary, he is definitely to be praised for the flexibility he displays in his use of words, as can be seen from the creation of these compound words through the use of the prefix ‘un’: ‘unavoided’, ‘unvalued’, ‘unbless’, unexpressive’ and ‘ungot’. This flexibility was perhaps the gift of the Renaissance and its emphasis on individual freedom.