Who is better than the Bard? The power of the word. For those who watched the first Shakespearean theater, the shows were filled with middle English slang words that would get laughter just by their utterance. To put a carcanet around an urchin snouted lady's neck, would, would leave the jeweler frampold at best. Like the idiom of making a silk purse our of a sow's ear, to put nice jewelry on the neck of an ugly woman, would irritate the artist. Word's like kirtle, garboil, bawcock, kicky wicky and gallimaulfry, are just a few words that when inserted into the script will always get a laugh.
I did a few years in street theater with the Oregon Renaissance Festival. Of the 50 cast actor's, most had little experience with middle English, and the 4 weeks of rehearsal's involved hours of middle English as second language training. OK, was one of the common words that had to be exorcised from everyone's talk. Using vintage word's and historical phrases was important, but better to be silent than to blow the whole shebang with a word like shebang, or Margaritaville. However the bloody Mary goes back to Mary Queen of Scott's, 1550.
My pod cast just runs through a number of nonsense and superfluous words of the 17th century. There are a lot of theater study guides for words and expressions of this era, as this, not old (Chaucer) or new English still dominates the stage and theater. Middle English includes the text of the King James Bible, and stretched from Henry VIII, through Elizabeth and James, into the late 18th century.
The 19th century English approximated our current tongues, with broadly different spellings of the same word. Blavatski and Twain would spell the word clue, as clew. Dictionaries emerged with the printing press, and became more abundant during the times of our nation's birth, but acceptance of one spelling of all words would not come instantly, and is an early 20th century evolution. Now International bodies regulate the inclusion and coining of new words in virtually all languages.
댓글