On The Borderland

The myth has gone on for years now that Shakespeare invented about 1,700 words still common in English. Not true. He Anglicized many Latin and Greek words, among other languages, thus coining new English words. But to be invented, a word must have no etymology before a single person imagines it.

He is said to have invented “assassination,” but what he did was derive it from the Medieval Latin “assassinare,” which means “to kill an important person.”

All of the words he is reputed to have invented can be explained this way. He did, however, devise first name uses for quite a few words, including Viola, Jessica, and Adrian. The first is Latin, the second Hebrew, the third Greek.

Sidenote: Sir Isaac Newton Anglicized “gravitas,” which is Latin for “weight,” into “gravity.” As he was the first to discover the mechanism and its properties, how they work, he had to come up with a word for it. No one else had ever called gravity anything.

(Image via www.nlcphs.org, text via Listverse)