Friday, April 22, 2022

Shakespeare maintained a lifelong attachment to thou in preference to you

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 5 page 112.

In many ways the language Shakespeare used was quite modern. He never employed the old-fashioned seeth but rather used the racier, more modern sees, and much preferred spoke to spake, cleft to clave, and goes to goeth. The new King James Bible, by contrast, opted for the older forms in each instance. At the same time Shakespeare maintained a lifelong attachment to thou in preference to you even though by the end of the sixteenth century thou was quaint and “dated. Ben Jonson used it hardly at all. He was also greatly attached to, and remarkably unself-conscious about, provincialisms, many of which became established in English thanks to his influence (among them cranny, forefathers, and aggravate), but initially grated on the ears of sophisticates.

He coined—or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of—2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career. Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labour’s Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them.

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