What in the World? - Shakespeare, Johnson, books that changed the world and literary first

Shakespeare, Johnson, books that changed the world and literary firsts

Shakespearean phrases, Johnson's dictionary, books that changed the world and literary "firsts"

POSTED DECEMBER 16, 2020

Shakespeare and the English Language

21 Phrases You Use Without Realizing You're Quoting William Shakespeare

Besides his 38 plays and 150 poems, William Shakespeare added at least 1700 words to the English language. He was familiar with seven languages and often adapted words from these into English. He had a vocabulary of a 24,000 words, many of which he coined himself. Among his word "inventions": manager, fashionable, eyeball, laughable, gloomy, lonely, bedazzled, addiction, scuffle, inaudible and moonbeam.

His plays provided later generations with a slew of common phrases still in use today, including: "wild goose chase", "pure as the driven snow", "forever and a day", "lie low", "love is blind", "heart of gold", and "you can have too much of a good thing."

The writings of Shakespeare contributed to the standardization of the English language rules and grammar in the 17th and 18th centuries. The words and phrases that he wrote were embedded in the language especially in “A Dictionary of the English Language” by Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dictionary from 1755 took eight years to write, contained definitions of more than 42,000 words, was the first to use quotations (114,000 of them!), and includes this definition of lexicographer: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.”

Today's Oxford English Dictionary contains definitions of 273,000 words, including 47,000 noted as "obsolete." For the first time ever, the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen not to name a word of the year, describing 2020 as “a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word”. Instead, from “unmute” to “mail-in”, and from “coronavirus” to “lockdown”, the eminent reference work has announced its “words of an ‘unprecedented’ year”.

Written "Firsts"

Oldest known piece of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 B.C., Sumeria)

First alphabet: Phoenician alphabet - earliest surviving inscription is from ~1100 BC

Oldest surviving play: "The Persians" by Aeschylus (Greece, 472 BC)

Oldest surviving work of English literature: Beowulf (Old English/Anglo-Saxon, 700-750)

The earliest complete dated printed book: The Diamond Sutra (868, China)

First novel: The Tale of Genji (by Murasaki Shikibu, 1008, Japan)

The Tale of Genji: The world’s first novel?Written 1,000 years ago, the epic story of 11th-Century Japan, The Tale of Genji, was written by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman.

First work of fiction in Europe: a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. (1170, Chrétien de Troyes)

Second book printed on a movable type printing press in the West: "Mainz Psalter" of 1457 (The Bible was the first)

First truly introspective character in English literature: Hamlet (Wm. Shakespeare, 1609)

First modern European novel: Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)

First detective story: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe 1841

First science fiction novel: It depends on what you mean by science fiction. Among the nominees: Somnium (1608 but publ. 1634) The Chemical Wedding (1616 but more of a fantasy), a dozen others from before the Industrial Revolution, and Frankenstein (1818).

Books that Changed the World

Ten books that changed the worldFrom Euclid’s Elements to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Shakespeare First Folio … 10 authors choose books ‘not of an age, but for all time’

Books have been central to the development of our societies, to the advancement of our sciences, and to human evolution. The UK Guardian discusses ten books that changed the world and the article (link above) is well worth the short read. Here's their list. Below are excerpts from the Guardian article.

- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

- The Analects by Confucius

- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

- Elements by Euclid

-The Interpretation of Dreams -Sigmund Freud

- A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold

-The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

-Beloved by Toni Morison

- Comedies, Histories & Tragedies by William Shakespeare

-Scripture

An even more ambitious effort is that of the OEDb (Open Education Data Base) which provides a categorized list of the 50 most influential books ever written. Link below.

The 50 Most Influential Books Ever Written | OEDb.orgOur top 50 books list covers the most influential and best books ever written. The most important books to read span across the entire history of writing.

Excerpts from "Ten Books that Changed the World" (The Guardian)

The Second Sex - "a panoramic sweep through women’s lives: work, motherhood, representation in literature, economic independence, sexuality, ageing and the boredom of cleaning the dust behind the wardrobe."

The Analects - "To understand China, first we have to understand Confucius’s Analects. Written more than 2,400 years ago, the book underpins the cultural structure of China...the Analects is a practical account of the human order of things: family loyalty, moral virtue, social hierarchy and politics. "

The Origin of Species - It isn’t just zoologists and biologists who have explored and developed Darwin’s propositions. The work of political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers has been shot through with Darwinian ideas, particularly the notion of competition for survival.

Elements - "Elements is the most important maths book of all time not because of the subject matter, but because of its revolutionary method. The book invented how mathematicians do mathematics."

The Interpretation of Dreams - "Writers and poets have always been alert to the troubling and darker sides of the psyche, but it was the dream book that showed so carefully how exactly these currents are forged and encrypted, how they undergo distortion and censorship and how they are formed and shaped by language."

A Sand County Almanac - "A Sand County Almanac, is one of the most influential books about the natural world ever published. It helped to transform what had been a...conservative, utilitarian conservation movement into the first stirrings of an ecologically centred green movement in the west."

The Communist Manifesto - "If you only ever read one paragraph of the work itself, it should be this: 'The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.' "

Beloved - "articulates the deep rage that many black women feel: the rage of impotence, the impossibility of protecting your child and yourself. Beloved makes the ghost of the little dead child a cri de coeur for all lost children. No writer who ventures on to this terrain can do so without 'knowing' this novel. It has left the realm of fiction and become a force of nature. "

Comedies, Histories & Tragedies - "The Folio was the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays. Almost every great thinker and many a great doer in the last 400 years has had a collection of Shakespeare to hand and has in some way been shaped by it...As Ben Jonson wrote in a wonderfully generous poem included in the prefatory matter, this is a book 'not of an age, but for all time' "

Scripture - "The spread of western power across the globe took the Bible to lands unimagined by its various authors. Today, its status as the world’s all-time bestseller is uncontested. No book in history can rival it for influence...There is, though, a close second. The Qur’an, like the New Testament, bears the recognisable stamp of Jewish scripture."

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