Shakespeare's English

Launder

Where it’s found: “A Lover’s Complaint”

How it’s used:

Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne,
Which on it had conceited characters,
Laundering the silken figures in the brine
That season’d woe had pelleted in tears,
And often reading what contents it bears;
As often shrieking undistinguish’d woe,
In clamours of all size, both high and low.

Where it comes from: I’ve covered a lot of Shakespeare’s plays on this blog, but never his poetry. Fortunately, he was just as prolific in his poems as he was in his scripts, and so we have our first example from a poem: launder.

Launder is actually a contraction of the word lavender, which in French (as lavandier) meant “washer” and not the flower. The French stole the word from Latin, lavandria, ultimately coming from the word lavare, “to wash.” So the word launder is related to the word lave. The sense of “money laundering” didn’t arise until the 1960s. [source]

Countless

Where it’s found: Titus Andronicus, Act V, Scene III

How it’s used:

MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Tear for tear, and loving kiss for kiss,
Thy brother Marcus tenders on thy lips:
O were the sum of these that I should pay
Countless and infinite, yet would I pay them!

Where it comes from: Titus Andronicus is probably Shakespeare’s first tragedy, written sometime between 1588 and 1590, and it is also one of his bloodiest. It was popular in his lifetime, but as time wore on it grew to become less respected than his other works. So I guess you could say it’s one of his…countless bloodstained works. (Yes, I did just use twoof the Bard’s coined words in one sentence. I’m moving at a thought a minute here, try and keep up.)

Countless is made of two parts. Count comes from Old French, where they used conter to mean “to add up,” but also “to tell a story.” It is ultimately derived from the Latin word computare, which is the root of the word computer. Interestingly enough, the verb has a completely different origin than the noun, i.e., the title of nobility. [source]

I’ve covered the origins of the suffix -less before, but for review:

it means lacking, and it comes from Old English -leas. Other Germanic languages have similar terms (-loos in Dutch, -los in German, etc.) [source]

Money’s Worth

Where it’s found: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act II, Scene I

How it’s used:

FERDINAND: But say that he or we, as neither have,
Received that sum, yet there remains unpaid
A hundred thousand more; in surety of the which,
One part of Aquitaine is bound to us,
Although not valued to the money’s worth.

Where it comes from: There’s no real interesting anecdote about the origins of this phrase, so I’ll just look at where the individual words come from.

Money arrived in English in the late 13th century as an Old French word, moneie, which was borrowed from a Latin word, moneta. Moneta was actually a title of the Roman goddess Juno, in whose temples money was coined. [source]

Worth comes from the other granddaddy of English, Anglo-Saxon. They had a word, weorð, which meant “equal in value to.” It’s (probably) descended from an Indo-European form that is also the root of the word versus. [source]

Accused

Where it’s found: Richard II, Act I, Scene I

How it’s used:

KING RICHARD II: Then call them to our presence; face to face,
And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear
The accuser and the accused freely speak:
High-stomach’d  are they both, and full of ire,
In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.

Where it comes from: Shakespeare did not invent the word accused, but he was the first writer to use it as a noun. And thank God for that, how cumbersome would it be to use “defendant” all the time?

Like a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo in English, accused is based in French and Latin. Old French had a word, acuser, which meant “to accuse” or “to indict.” That came from Latin, accusare, “to call into account.” That is made up of two elements: ad-, which means “without,” and causari, “to give as a cause or motive.” This is related to the root of the English word cause. [source]

Fortune-teller

Where it’s found: The Comedy of Errors, Act V, Scene I

How it’s used:

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS: Along with them
They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
A dead-looking man: this pernicious slave,
Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer,
And gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse,
And with no face, as ‘twere, outfacing me
Cries out, I was possess’d.

Where it comes from: Fortune meandered into English from Old French (where the word was spelled the same way), which plucked it from the mouths of the Romans: fortuna was “chance, fate, or good luck,” with its root in the word fors. It’s possible the Latin word has a root in a proto-Indo-European word that meant “to carry.” [source]

Teller in this case means the same as a bank clerk. People in the 15th century understood it to mean “one who keeps accounts.” The word teller is related to the Old English word tellan, which meant “to reckon” or “to account.” Its cousin is the word tale — which is interesting, because most fortune-tellers tell nothing but tales. [source]

Mortifying

Where it’s found: Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Scene III

How it’s used:

DON JOHN: I wonder that thou, being, as thou sayest thou art,
born under Saturn, goest about to apply a moral
medicine to a mortifying mischief.

Where it comes from: Mortify originally meant “to kill,” and it came into English from the Old French mortifier, which in turn is a descendent of Latin’s mortificare.

You can find two different Latin roots in that word: the Latin word mors, which meant “death” (which is where Lord Voldemort’s name comes from!), and facere, “to make.” The latter is also the root of the word “facetious.” [source]

Bottled

Where it’s found: Richard III, Act I, Scene III

How it’s used:

QUEEN MARGARET: Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune!
Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider,
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?

Where it comes from: Bottled is a useful term if you have ever played any game from The Legend of Zelda franchise, where I swear bottles are more valuable than gold.

Obviously Shakespeare’s use of the term comes from the noun bottle. Originally they were made of leather and were called (in Old French) boteille. This word wound its way to English from Vulgar Latin and ultimately a late Latin word, buttis, meaning a kind of cask. [source]

Now, of course, the term is mostly used to refer to water that you can buy for an ungodly amount of money, considering you already pay for tap water that’s cleaner.

Dauntless

Where it’s found: Macbeth, Act III, Scene I

How it’s used:

MACBETH: ‘Tis much he dares,
And to that dauntless temper of his mind
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valor
To act in safety.

Where it comes from: Dauntless is obviously a compound of, well, daunt and -less. The last part is pretty easy to figure out — it means lacking, and it comes from Old English -leas. Other Germanic languages have similar terms (-loos in Dutch, -los in German, etc.) [source]

To daunt something is, according to the Free Dictionary, “to abate the courage of” whatever you’re daunting. It comes from our friends the Normans, who had a word danter, meaning the same thing. This was a variant of donter, which came from the Latin word domitare, a form of the word domare, meaning “to tame.” [source]

Dauntless is also (apparently) the name of a kind of airplane. So here’s a picture of tyrannosaurs in F-14s, courtesy of Bill Watterson.

Gallantry

Where it’s found: Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene I

How it’s used:

PARIS: Hector, Deiphobus, Helenus, Atenor, and all the
gallantry of Troy: I would fain have armed today
but my Nell would not have it so.

Where it comes from: Gallantry comes from the French, and not even the Normans that came over to England in the 11th century and conquered it. No, gallantry comes from the Bourbons and their escargot and revolutions (I know a lot about French history, clearly, especially 16th century France). It was galanterie in French, meaning “fine appearance.” [source]

Obviously this word is related to gallant, which in fact comes from Old French, galant. This word has a more complex background than its 16th century cousin. It originally meant “amusing,” and was a form of the word galer, meaning “rejoice” or “make merry.” This in turn was a Latinized form of a Frankish prefix, wala-, meaning “good.” That made a roundabout journey from Germanic and ultimately from the Indo-European word that went on to become the verb will. [source]

Bloodstained

Where it’s found: Henry IV Part I, Act I, Scene III

How it’s used:

HOTSPUR: Three times they breathed and three times did
they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn’s flood;
Who, then, affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And his his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Bloodstained with these valiant combatants.

Where it comes from: One of the great things about Shakespeare was how he could combine two old words to make one brand spanking new one. He did it with puppy-dog, with arch-villain, with eyeball — and now with bloodstained. (I feel like putting all of those into one sentence makes for a macabre story…)

So, where does blood come from? The bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons gave us the word through their term blod. It has a long and storied history in other Germanic languages, popping up in Frisian, Old Norse, Middle Dutch, and Gothic, among others. In fact, its root is also responsible for the word flower in the Gothic tongue, leading etymologists to speculate that the proto-Germanic word meant “that which bursts forth.” [source]

Stained, as a noun, was much newer in Shakespeare’s day than blood. The verb was in use before that, and it appears to be a linguistic mutt. Old Norse had a word steina, meaning “to paint,” and Middle English had a word disteynen, meaning “to discolor.” The latter, in turn, came from a combination of Old French and Latin, emerging out of the word that meant “to dye,” which is also the root of the word tincture. [source]

As Ron Weasley might say, “Bloody brilliant.”