06.09.08

“My Generation,” sung by Shakespeare guesting for Roger Daltry

Posted in Shakespeare, myths and misconceptions, redundancy at 7:06 am by Bill Brohaugh

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, dinosaurs and other thought-to-be extinct creatures have survived on a South American plateau. Look, up there—pterodactyls! Over there—a stegosaurus! And the rarest find of all—a group decended from Elizabethan colonists who still speak perfect Shakespearean English!

Of course, the children of the colonists are not denizens of the Lost World. They actually live in the Appalachian Mountains (or maybe in a holler—a real Elizabethan word, that). Or so goes a myth as old as the dinosaurs and, despite A. Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton, even more persistent. This is one of a number of Shakespeare-related canards discussed by David Crystal in his recent Think On My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language. “Anyone who believes this is, as Thersites says of Agamemnon [in Troylus and Cressida], ‘not so much brain as ear-wax,’” Crystal writes. So much ear-wax that they can’t hear the arguments against the probability of an entire language being preserved like a prehistoric insect encased in amber (which is not a type of hardened ear-wax, by the way). “It’s a myth born of ignorance of the basic facts about the way language changes.” Shakespeare himself, Crystal notes, “even refers at one point to language change taking place within a generation. Mercutio [in Romeo and Juliet] sneeringly describes the way Tybalt speaks; he calls him one of the ‘new tuners of accent.’”

Good stuff for the wrong-wrong-wrong crowd, and recommended—though more than a bit pricey at an $80 list price. I also recommend Crystal’s The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, which takes an Everything You Know About English Is Wrong attitude in expressing counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference! (now with pictures in addition to exclamation points!).

Crystal’s blog deserves regular visits, as well.

Think of the possibilities: M. Night Shyamalan and Michael Crichton co-script a film in which a secret village of Shakespearean speakers finally surfaces amongst crop circles in a corn field. Coming soon to a theater near someone: The Lost Word!

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