[Petra Norr]

Bill Bryson has an eye-opening account of Shakespeare's inventive use of language in his book, Shakespeare:

Quote: "He coined -- or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of -- 2,035 words...
"Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary. excellent, eventful. barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless)."

Bryson also says: "Not everyone appreciated this creative impulse. When Robert Greene [a contemporary of Shakespeare] referred to him as 'beautified by our feathers', he was mocking a Shakespeare neologism in beautified."

Together with "beautified" and the other words mentioned above, some of our "un-" words made their first appearance in Shakespeare's writings, including unmask, unhand, unlock, untie and unveil..

As Bryson says, some of Shakespeare's words never caught on, such as undeaf, untent, exsufflicate, bepray and insultment. But about 800 of his words are still used today.

Bryson goes on to say that Shakespeare's real gift was as a phrasemaker. Among the phases well known today that were apparently first coined by him are vanish into thin air, play fast and loose, bag and baggage, be in a pickle, the milk of human kindness, blinking idiot, with bated breath, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion, and many others.
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Quotes and paraphrases from p. 112-114 in Bill Bryson's Shakespeare.

[Allen Tice]

Mousing here and eyeballing what had been authored between mousings, I happied me. Like, it was like, like Shaxpere had playwrighted again. Truthiness is: I did, as waitpersons in U.S. say now before walking quickly away, "enjoy...?"

Yo, what gift the gifter gie us (giftees), to forget oursel'es as others forgift us.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

I'm with Chris here. If the verb "to gift" is here to stay then it is no doubt because it can do things that "to give" can't. If two words are identical in meaning, one will fall out of use.

That it can take some getting used to is something else. And for most of us the older we get the less inclined we are to appreciate the introduction of new words which we didn't know we needed. Words reassure us with their relative permanence, and when we find they have been adapted it feels like a betrayal.

Duncan

[John Whitworth]

In one of the Molesworth books there is a Searle drawing of a gerund ignoring a gerundive, though I'm not sure if I've got the verb right. Anyway it shows both gerund and gerundive to be curious creatures.

I came upon a gerund.
He was busy on an errand
And it scarcely had the time to say, 'Gor blimey!'

'By the solemn skies above me
When I find a girl to love me
she turns out to be a versifying limey!'

'When I want to give my undiv-
ided love to a gerundive,
Why should Venus send me poets thus to try me?'

Finish the rhyme, Ann, or anyone else.

[Richard Meyer]

Originally Posted by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin

If two words are identical in meaning, one will fall out of use.

Huh? Don't many words in the language have long lists of synonyms? Among the synonyms for a particular word, some will have the same or nearly the same meaning, while others will carry significant or subtle differences, either denotatively or connotatively. And it would be a specious argument to say that no two synonymous words are really identical in meaning, for then logic would seem to dictate that no two words exist or could ever exist that mean the same thing, which makes the above quoted statement rather absurd.

Richard

[Roger Slater]

Duncan, that's very bad news for Roget. Like Richard, I neither concur nor agree.