| OCR Text |
Show - ( r JOST STUFF BYJfiM VL 1 i We all know of William Shakespeare. Granted, the "Where for art thou's" might be a little - much for everyday reading, but we're all somewhat familiar with Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and the gang. While most of us don't claim to know a lot about his . writings, perhaps we've struggled through a few of his plays. Some may have read them all, time and time again, but none of us pretend to continually quote Shakespeare. So it may come as a surprise to find that we all tend to quote the Bard without even knowing it. It could be a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Were the phrases popular when . Shakespeare incorporated them into ; his plays, or were the plays written ; and then the phrases became ; popular? Whichever the case may be, some of today's most common phrases stem from the work of Shakespeare. When something is missing and there's no explanation for where it's gone, we comment that it's "melted into thin air." Little do we realize we're quoting from Shakespeare's "Tempest". When someone eats a bunch we say they've "eaten us out of house and home." The same thing was said in "Henry IV". "It's Greek to me," comes from "Julius Caesar", and the common answer to "how are things" "so so", comes from "As You Like It." When we say someone wears their heart on their sleeve, we're actually quoting from "Othello", and if someone brings you chocolates and says "sweets to the sweet," they're actually being more romantic than they assume. They're quoting from "Hamlet". I knew that Shakespeare was responsible for "What's in a name? " and the business about a rose is a rose is a rose, and most people know "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo." But we all seem to use more Shakespeare than we knew we knew. Even the pioneers on their trek west quoted William without knowing it. "Westward-ho" comes from "Twelfth Night." |
