Month: July 2010

I don’t know whether Calvin and Hobbes (who coined my chosen subject line) were in the brain of Erin McKean when she penned this masterful yet subtle slam on a certain recent Shakespeare-wanna-be in the news about how the English language evolves the right way.  (In truth, the timing may purely be coincidental, as Mrs. Palin is not mentioned at all in the article.  But I like to think it was deliberate…) The subject? Verbing.  That is, the use of nouns as verbs.  English allows for it, whether you like it or not.  I have a blog, I blog things.  I also have a table, and I can table things.  I look around my office and spy a wall, and technically I could say that I was going to wall my calendar, although what that means might be ambiguous – am I going to hang it up? If I walled my buddha statue that might mean I threw it at the wall.  Or I suppose I could lure my enemy down into my wine cellar with the promise of Amontillado and then wall him up down there, too. Grammatically, all valid sentences. Verbing is also at the center of an old grammatical puzzler:  “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”.  I think I got the right number of Buffalo in there.  Because the word happens to work as a noun (the animal), an adjective (the place from which they come), and a verb, you get such a valid sentence. It’s often hated, no doubt.  We all google things and xerox them without too much thought, but sit in a meeting with too many MBA project managers talking about statusing each other or incentivizing their customer base and you may want to beat them with a dictionary. Oh, and one more thing, and I think that this is how and when you correctly drop Shakespeare’s name:

Philip Davis, a professor at the School of English at the University of Liverpool, devised a study in 2006 that tested just what happens when people read sentences with verbed nouns in them–and not just any verbed nouns, nouns verbed by Shakespeare. (Shakespeare was an inveterate noun-verber; he verbed ghost, in ”Julius Caesar, I Who at Phillipi the good Brutus ghosted”; dog, in ”Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels”; and even uncle, in ”Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.”)

Status: Not Shakespeare

I woke up this morning to this quote making Twitter’s “Top Retweets” section of my feed – that’s when somebody says something that gets repeated by over 100 other people.

Yikes.

This expression is much older than Mr. Shakespeare. To be fair, it was popularized in the West when Abraham Lincoln used it, and he was known to quote a fair bit of Shakespeare.  But Lincoln apparently cited his source (somewhat), and it wasn’t Shakespeare he referred to:

 

(You need to scroll down a bit, the embedded Google books reader will only take us to the page, not the exact paragraph we want.)

So the expression is at least as old as “Jewish folklore” or perhaps a Persian Sufi poet circa 1200A.D.  Either way it’s much, much older than Shakespeare.

Status: Not Shakespeare

Saw this one fly by on Twitter the other day, attributed to Shakespeare.  Luckily it’s an easy mistake to correct, as it is all over the net that the actual author was Plato, specifically in his dialogue The Banquet.

Here’s William Gerber writing about the topic from his book “Love, poetry and immortality : luminous insights of the world’s great thinkers”:

I’m always torn when reviewing a major piece of work, like Richard Burton’s Hamlet.  On the one hand I want to watch it straight through, taking notes, and do one long and detailed review.  But I watch it so piecemeal over time, spotting and then forgetting crucial moments I want to specifically call out, that I feel the need to put up a post every time I have an idea.

Right now I want to pursue that second idea.  You know the scene where Horatio meets up with Hamlet, and they go through the whole “I saw him once”, “I think I saw him yesternight” exchange?  Hamlet has a line where he says, simply, “Saw? who?” and Horatio answers “My lord the king your father.”

I’ve seen it done with confusion, as if Hamlet has no idea what Horatio’s talking about. I’ve seen it done more throwaway, like Hamlet’s only half paying attention to Horatio, too busy daydreaming about his father.

Burton’s version has this great long pause between “Saw” and “who” where the whole scene comes together, and I think it’s just wonderful.  It’s like he starts the thought not really paying attention (not even looking at Horatio), “Saw….” and then as he says it, he realizes what Horatio means.  And then the whole tone of the scene shifts because now he’s not sure he wants the answer.  He turns to face Horatio, and the “Who?” is scared, defensive, like “I think I know what you’re about to tell me and I’m not sure I like it.”  Which really makes sense, when you think about it.  Someone doesn’t just tell you they saw the ghost of your dad and you just get all excited and say “Oh good I hope I get to see him too.”

The rest plays out like an interrogation, and I have to watch it again but I could swear that Hamlet in this instance isn’t too crazy about the idea of his father coming back, he’s terrified.  There’s even a great moment where Hamlet, seated, is asking his questions – “Armed? Top to toe?” when he suddenly jumps up and *states*, as if he’s a lawyer trying to prove his case, “Then saw you not his face!” This was surely a Hamlet who would have been happy to discover that this was not, in fact, his father.

Anyway, I’m not too much farther into the movie so I can’t go deep, but I wanted to stop there with an idea.  Can you spot another scene, preferably in a movie version so it’s captured on film, where there’s a moment *between the words*, one of those moments that’s entirely on the actor and not the words, that turns the scene for you?  A facial expression, a physical posture, what have you.  Something that, without any words, says everything?  I looked for a YouTube version of this particular scene to embed, but I can’t find it.  There are several other Burton clips online, so hopefully I can make use of those in later posts.

Status: Misquoted.

I am guessing that this quote is actually a casual paraphrase of this one, from Henry VI Part 3:

For trust not him that hath once broken faith

So what should we call these?  Technically not Shakespeare, but a pretty clear case of just paraphrasing what was originally said.