The bard, bumfuzzle moments and ballhooters
KOCHI: April 23 was an interesting day. It was the birth as well as death anniversary of William Shakespeare. And it was celebrated as World English Day.
Initiated by UNESCO in 2010, the day commemorates the legendary English playwright and poet, and promotes the use of English as a global language of communication.
Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. He was born in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in April 1564. Although the exact date of his birth is not recorded, it is widely believed to be April 23.
The Bard died on his 52nd birthday in 1616. It is said Shakespeare fell ill after a night of heavy drinking with fellow playwrights Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.
Shakespeare’s life and work continue to be celebrated and studied with great interest. His plays, which include Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello, are widely regarded as some of the greatest works of literature in the English language.
His impact on the English language is also immeasurable, and many commonly used phrases and idioms can be traced back to his writings. Also, Shakespeare’s plays are renowned for their depth of characterisation, intricate plots, and timeless themes that explore the human experience in all its complexity.
His wizardry with language was incredible, to put it simply. And nuances of human emotion and psychology shone through his prose and poetry.
Shakespeare is credited with conjuring or introducing at least 1,700 words, many of which are used in our daily conversations.
Sample these:
Assassination (Macbeth)
Bedroom (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Bump (Romeo and Juliet)
Champion (Macbeth)
Critic (Love’s Labour’s Lost)
Dawn (Romeo and Juliet)
Drunkenness (Macbeth)
Fashionable (Troilus and Cressida)
Gossip (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Hint (The Merchant of Venice)
Hobnob (Twelfth Night)
Hostile (Henry VI, Part 3)
Manager (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Negotiate (Henry IV, Part 2)
Obscene (Love’s Labour’s Lost)
Pious (Measure for Measure)
Quaint (Romeo and Juliet)
Radiance (All’s Well That Ends Well)
Scuffle (Antony and Cleopatra)
Swagger (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Torture (The Winter’s Tale)
Undress (The Taming of the Shrew)
Worthless (King Lear)
Vengeful (Hamlet)
Zany (Love’s Labour’s Lost)
I recall a sage advice from one of my mentors: “Read Shakespeare — you will get a grip on language, and human nature.”
For those looking to get started, here are the top 10 (he wrote 30 plays) classics by Shakespeare:
Romeo and Juliet (1595)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)
Richard III (1592)
The Merchant of Venice (1596)
Hamlet (1599)
Othello (1603)
King Lear (1605)
Macbeth (1606)
Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
The Tempest (1610-1611)
Incidentally, a tempestuous journalist friend who doth teach the torches to burn bright, in Shakespeares’s words, hurled a word challenge at me on this World English Day. Though caught off guard, it was an exciting, enlightening interaction. Got to learn some new words
Persiflage: “comments and jokes in which people laugh at each other in a fairly unkind but not serious way”
Solipsistic: “connected with the theory that only the self exists or can be known”; “Solipsism is the belief that only oneself and one’s experience exists. It is the extreme consequence of believing that knowledge must be founded on inner, personal states of experience, and then failing to find a bridge whereby they can inform us of anything beyond themselves.”
Codswallop: “ideas, statements or beliefs that you think are silly or not true synonym nonsense”
Lethologica: “forgetting of a word and the trace of that word we know is somewhere in our memory”;
“If you cannot recall the precise word for something, you have a case of lethologica, which may lead you to an obsession with trying to recall it — loganamnosis.” (You know, that tip-of-the-tongue feeling)
The one that bamboozled and got me running for cover was ‘bumfuzzle’. Nah, nothing cheeky, dirty minds.
Bumfuzzle simply means to “confuse, perplex, or fluster”. It is widely believed Shakespeare famously said, “English is a funny language”. True that.
Okay, time for me to go on a solipsistic quest. Leaving you with some words that sound and mean worlds apart, courtesy of Merriam-Webster:
Dickcissel: “a common migratory black-throated finch (Spiza americana of the family Cardinalidae)”
Fartlek: ”endurance training in which a runner alternates periods of sprinting with periods of jogging”
Coverslut: ”an outer garment worn to conceal untidy clothes”
Bumbass: “a bass fiddle consisting of a string stretched on a pole and over a bladder and bowed with a notched stick”
Assart: “the clearing of wooded land for cultivation, or a parcel of cleared land”
Pontoon: “a flat-bottomed boat (such as a lighter); especially : a flat-bottomed boat or portable float used in building a floating temporary bridge”
Ballhooter: “a logger who rolls logs down slopes too steep for teams” aka brutter
Gugelhupf: “a semisweet cake usually of yeast-leavened dough containing raisins, citron, and nuts and baked in a fluted tube pan”
Pahoehoe: “basaltic lava having a smooth, often billowy, shiny surface”