Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 February 15

= February 15 =

What are the least obscure words of today's English that aren't in Shakespeare
Excluding words that would've been anachronistic or foreign at any time Shakespeare was being written, proper nouns, spelling or tense/part of speech variants and any he or his ghostwriter might've avoided for tact (i.e. cunt), bad English avoidance (i.e. ain't?) or any taboo in general (transubstantiation?) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:37, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Googling the subject indicates the OED counts 171,476 English words in current usage. You could build a table of those. Then you could subtract out the 28,829 unique word forms in Shakespeare's plays (per www.opensourceshakespeare.org), and apply your additional criteria to weed out more of them. Then take a look at the remaining set of 125,000 or so, and determine which ones are in most common usage. Presumably the initial weeding will remove common words like a, an, the, and, or, etc. <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 21:09, 15 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Putting aside the odd notion that it's "bad English" (and what this, even if true, would have meant for Shakespeare), "ain't" would have been anachronistic. If you want to avoid anachronisms, then rather than all 171,476 of the OED headwords, you'd just want those for which the OED has examples earlier than 1616 (was it?). And you'd have to decide what you meant by "foreign". (Recognizably of latinate origin? Risibly of latinate origin? Something else?) &para; If you just want a few examples, then I'll start you off with greed, which came into use around 1600 (as a back-formation from greedy) but which Shakespeare doesn't seem to use. (He does use agreed with the first syllable elided.) &para; You may wish to consider increasing the percentage of your Wikipedia energies that you devote to improving articles. -- Hoary (talk) 01:10, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sagittarian Milky Way may wish to consider that, but then again, may not; that's a matter of his/her personal values. If you find these questions annoying, surely you have a remedy available, which is simply not to answer them. --Trovatore (talk) 01:20, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I do not find the question annoying. -- Hoary (talk) 01:31, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * But you find paragraphination annoying ;)   ——  SN  54129  12:27, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's an intriguing question, but could be very hard to find an answer to, given the very specific criteria. It sounds like a database question. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:28, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Foreign as in not considered English yet though loanwords don't become English in an instant so that's fuzzy too. Is jinn English now or only genie? I don't even know. If it's in OED at the right time I guess it's naturalized enough. Words like airplane, Hawaii or guerrilla (Spanish for little war only till early 1800s) would be too easy and I'm not wondering about words he might've intentionally left out like cunt (country being very close innuendo but not quite the word in print). Webster says greed is from 1609 which gives it an unfair advantage over something that was already a word when the first Shakespeare was written. I suppose you could also consider it a part of speech variant of greedy, I'm amazed greedy is way older. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 07:01, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps if you said what your purpose was, people could provide a method of attaining it that wouldn't require that you did a vast amount of work. -- Hoary (talk) 08:08, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In regard to one of your exclusions, see Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2. --Trovatore (talk) 01:26, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Could you be a little more specific? -- Hoary (talk) 01:31, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Probably this business:
 * HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters?
 * OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
 * HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
 * OPHELIA: What is, my lord?
 * HAMLET: Nothing.
 * -- Orange Mike &#124;  Talk  01:53, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In the annotated edition I used in high school, "country matters" was footnoted as "rustic doings", which more or less exactly failed to answer the question that had induced me to look at the footnote. The answer to said question was of course "yes", as I should have known and probably did know, but I was looking for confirmation. --Trovatore (talk) 02:09, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I've seen an assertion that nothing was itself a slang term relevant in the context, seen also in Much Ado About Nothing. —Tamfang (talk) 01:27, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's a dick joke. A maid has no thing  between her legs.  In this case, he's saying that she's never had a penis between her legs before, being a maid (used in this sense of a virginal young woman).  Country matters in this case is the sense of "vulgar matters" where vulgar can mean both "prurient" and "related to poor, uneducated people".  The passage is full of double entendres for sex.  -- Jayron 32 16:29, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * "country matters", like "country mistresses" elsewhere, was also a cheap pun on "cunt", intended to amuse that century's equivalent of Beavis & Butthead fans. Heh, heh: he said "cuntry"!-- Orange Mike &#124;  Talk  16:37, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That too. -- Jayron 32 17:08, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Shakespeare wasn't shy about hinting at French obscenities: AnonMoos (talk) 06:34, 16 February 2020 (UTC) KATHERINE: Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe? ALICE: "De foot," madame, et "de coun." [i.e. gown] KATHERINE: "De foot" et "de coun." Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user.
 * When we studied Shakespeare at school (I think it was Hamlet) part of the play was excised from our texts for this reason.  It was the soliloquy of the doorkeeper, which I only found about later when a writer mentioned it.   Many years ago the playing of this song  on the radio was frowned upon.   I often wondered why - today the penny dropped.   Rolf Harris did a cover version .   You can tell how old the song is from his lyrics:


 * For they've all downed tools while they fill their football pools
 * In an English country garden.
 * Market?  Join the Common Market.

In the visuals he comes out as a Leaver - as a native of Western Australia that doesn't surprise me in the slightest. 2A00:23C4:5719:600:6820:F707:B127:E724 (talk) 11:24, 20 February 2020 (UTC)