A History of English Language

The renaissance, 1500-1650 217
reintroduced in the sixteenth century or first gained currency at that time. Many of the
new words, of course, enjoyed but a short life. Some even appeared only once or twice
and were forgotten. But about half of the total number have become a permanent part of
the language. A very large majority were from Latin, and this accession from Latin is
sometimes known as the Latin Influence of the Fourth Period. Not all of the additions
filled gaps in the existing vocabulary, but they gave the language a wealth of synonyms.
In the course of time these have often become differentiated, enabling us to express slight
shades of meaning that would otherwise have been unattainable. Most of the new words
entered English by way of the written language. They are a striking evidence of the new
force exerted by the printing press. They also furnish a remarkable instance of the ease
with which the printed word can pass into everyday speech. For although many of the
new words were of a distinctly learned character in the beginning, they did not remain so
very long, a fact that not only can be inferred from their widespread popular use today
but also can be illustrated from the plays of Shakespeare or almost any of his
contemporaries.
172. The Movement Illustrated in Shakespeare.
It is a well-known fact that, except for a man like the Elizabethan translator Philemon
Holland, Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer. This is due not
only to his daring and resourceful use of words but also in part to his ready acceptance of
new words of every kind. It is true that he could make sport of the inkhorn terms of a
pedant like Holofernes, who quotes Latin, affects words like intimation, insinuation,
explication, and replication, and has a high scorn for anyone like the slow-witted Dull
who, as another character remarks, “hath not eat paper.” Shakespeare had not read
Wilson in vain (see p. 218). But he was also not greatly impressed by Wilson’s extreme
views. Among Shakespearian words are found agile, allurement, antipathy, catastrophe,
consonancy, critical, demonstrate, dire, discountenance, emphasis, emulate,
expostulation, extract, hereditary, horrid, impertinency, meditate, modest, pathetical,
prodigious, vast, the Romance words ambuscado, armada, barricade, bastinado,
cavalier, mutiny, palisado, pell-mell, renegado—all new to English in the latter half of
the sixteenth century. Some of the words Shakespeare uses must have been very new
indeed, because the earliest instance in which we find them at all is only a year or two
before he uses them (e.g., exist, initiate, jovial), and in a number of cases his is the
earliest occurrence of the word in English (accommodation, apostrophe, assassination,
dexterously, dislocate, frugal, indistinguishable, misanthrope, obscene, pedant,
premeditated, reliance, submerged, etc.). He would no doubt have been classed among
the liberals in his attitude toward foreign borrowing. Shakespeare’s use of the new words
illustrates an important point in connection with them. This is the fact that they were
often used, upon their first introduction, in a sense different from ours, closer to their
etymological meaning in Latin. Thus, to communicate nowadays means to exchange
information, but in Shakespeare’s day it generally preserved its original meaning ‘to
share or make common to many’. This is its force when Adriana says in the Comedy of
Errors: