Shakespeare's English

Gust

Where it’s found: Henry VI, Part 3, Act II, Scene VI

How it’s used:

EDWARD: Now breathe we, lords: good fortune bids us pause,
And smooth the frowns of war with peaceful looks.
Some troops pursue the bloody-minded queen,
That led calm Henry, though he were a king,
As doth a sail, fill’d with a fretting gust,
Command an argosy to stem the waves.

Where it comes from: Gust comes from Old Norse, where they had a word, gustr (unrelated to the band Guster) that meant “a cold blast of wind.” This was related to the word gusa, which meant “to spurt,” and is the source of our word gush today. Interestingly enough, it can be traced back to a proto-Indo-European root word that is also the source of the word found. [source]

Flawed

Where it’s found: King Lear, Act V, Scene III

How it’s used:

EDGAR: Not sure, though hoping, of this good success,
I ask’d his blessing, and from first to last
Told him my pilgrimage: but his flaw’d heart,
Alack, to weak the conflict to support!

Where it comes from: It seems very fitting that one of the adjectives that best describes so many of Shakespeare’s characters — or at least all of the ones from his tragedies — was coined by the Bard himself.

Flawed did not originally have anything to do with the content of a man or woman’s character. Instead, in the early 14th century, a flaw was… a snowflake, or a spark of fire. It comes from an Old Norse word, flaga, which is where the word flagstone comes from. It was first used to refer to a defect or a fault (and not a snowflake) in the 1580s, and King Lear was its first use as an adjective to describe people. [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.”

Swagger

Where it’s found: Henry IV Part 2, Act II, Scene IV

How it’s used:

MISTRESS QUICKLY: If he swagger, let him not come here: no, by my
faith; I must live among my neighbours; I’ll no
swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the
very best: shut the door; there comes no swaggerers
here: I have not lived all this while, to have
swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.

Where it comes from: Henry IV Part 2 was written sometime in the late 1590s. He had actually used an iteration of swagger before, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written in the earlier half of the 1590s), found in Act III, Scene I:

PUCK: What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,
So near the cradle of the fairy queen?

But I like the use in Henry IV Part 2 better, if only because it uses the form swagger and also because the scene in which it’s found is pretty funny. Either way, the word’s first attestation is from the last decade of the 16th century. Yes, while Ke$ha is somehow making money because the world is convinced she’s got swagger, we can all thank Shakespeare for that.

So where’s it from? Swagger is related to the verb swag, which is not actually the spoils of pirates. Swag means roughly the same thing as swagger (“to move heavily or unsteadily”), and took a circuitous route to English: it started as an Old Norse word, sveggja, plus an Old English cognate, swingan, both of which mean “to swing.” [source]

Either way, Shakespeare’s got swagger.

Cow

Where it’s found: Macbeth, Act V, Scene VIII

How it’s used:

MACBETH: Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow’d my better part of man!

Where it comes from: Shakespeare did not actually invent the word that we use to refer to those pre-cheeseburgers, but he did first use it as a verb in English.

The use of cow as a verb probably comes from the Old Norse word kuga, which means “to oppress.” It also might come from the notion that cows are easily herded. (Cow itself comes from the Old English cu.) [source]

Whirligig

Where it’s found: Twelfth Night, Act V Scene I

How it’s used:

CLOWN: But do you remember? ‘Madam, why laugh you at such
    a barren rascal? an you smile not, he’s gagged:’
    and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges

Where it comes from: Whirligig is built of two separate words. Whirl is ultimately arrived at by whir, which is a Scottish term whir, from Old Norse hvirfla, which is also the route of the word wharf. Hvirfla means “to turn.” [source]

Gig is a Danish term for “spinning top,” though it might also have arrived in Shakespeare’s English by ghyg, which meant the same thing. [source]

Bedazzled

Where it’s found: The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Scene IV

How it’s used:

KATHARINA: Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes,
That have been so bedazzled with the sun
That everything I look on seemeth green:
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father;
Pardon, I pray thee, for my mad mistaking.

Where it comes from: Shakespeare doesn’t seem to be the first person to use the word bedazzled, but it’s the earliest attestation of the word. The Taming of the Shrew is one of his earliest plays, written sometime around 1590.

Bedazzled quite obviously comes from the word dazzle, which in turn is a form of daze. Daze came into modern English from the Middle English word dasen, which came to us from our Viking friends in Norway. The Old Norse term dasask meant “to make weary.” [source 1] [source 2]

What all that has to do with sticking a boatload of rhinestones on your blue jeans escapes me.