Shakespeare's vocabulary no greater than the average person

It's popularly imagined Shakespeare had and employed a fabulously vast vocabulary but research under way in the school of Shakespeare Studies at De Montfort University in England suggests his vocabulary was relatively modest.

It was probably smaller than my own perhaps pretentiously puffed-up whopper, explaining why the word hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia occurs so often in my columns* but is nowhere to be found in Hamlet or in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Indeed it, the bard's vocabulary, may have been only about the size of the vocabulary of the average well-educated, literature-reading reader of this newspaper.

This startling-for-some finding came up this week during ABC Radio National's Science Show.

Professor of Shakespeare studies Gabriel Egan explained how computational studies of Shakespeare's plays reveal all sorts of things (alas, no room in this petite column to discuss them all) including that we may have been looking in the wrong place for the essence of Shakespeare's genius.

"If we think, as many people have assumed, that Shakespeare's genius lay in his vocabulary, his range of words," the professor trilled "then these methods [computer analyses of Shakespeare's language] show that we were mistaken.

"He did not have a larger vocabulary than anybody else. In fact he didn't have a larger vocabulary than you [the professor's interviewer]. He had an average vocabulary. It's not simply the range of words he's using, it's how he's deploying those words. And he is clearly capable of finding the phrase that has endured, that people have thought encapsulates something about human feelings."

"I was struck only the other day by the new King of England, Charles III, saying of his mother - 'Peaceful sleep, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest' - which is a line from Hamlet. It's Horatio's line to the dying Hamlet.

"Shakespeare has this unerring knack of finding the phrase that people, centuries later, feel captures their feelings, and it's not simply in the choice of words.

"There were no special words in that phrase, 'flights of angels sing thee to thy rest'.

"No unusual words. It's their combination, and the study of their combination can be enhanced by computational methods."

"All it returns you to is the wonder of the writing itself, not diminished at all by the fact that you've used computational methods to uncover just what he's doing. The mystery is not gone, we are returned to deeper mysteries about how he managed to actually think up these combinations of words."

Forgive your Shakespeare-crazed columnist (as I write I am counting the sleeps until going to a performance of The Tempest in Sydney) for dwelling on this research, these findings. But as well as giving us deepened reasons for Shakespeare worship it all seems to have so many lessons to teach any of us who at work or at play use English to try to effectively communicate anything to anyone else.

And while on words never used by Shakespeare there are some very fine words he, dying in 1616, couldn't have used because they have only just in recent years been invented, commissioned, inspired by Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante's ongoing participatory art project the Bureau of Linguistical Reality.

You can read all about the bureau online (see a new Smithsonian Magazine piece "How Two California Artists Can Help Personalize Your Eco-Grief").

But put simply the two San Francisco women found eight years ago there were no words in our olde English vocabulary for them, for any of us, to use to properly describe, discuss, communicate new feelings of grief about new climate change horrors.

They began to make words up and now, through the bureau, invite us all to join in this project.

Some of the words are so good, so apt, one wonders how we have managed without them.

Here, nimble-minded, articulate readers, are some recent Bureau-creation neologisms, just reported in Smithsonian Magazine, you may find wordspinningly indispensable.

Shadowtime is the acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different from the present.

Blissonance is when an otherwise blissful experience in nature is disrupted by the dissonant feeling your presence is harming that very place.

Ennuipocalypse is a doomsday that occurs slowly, while we are too bored to pay attention to its wicked progress.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN COLUMNS:

Gwilt is the eco-guilt one feels when one causes one's plants and gardens to wilt when one is trying to save precious water.

If you suddenly become possessed by a morbid desire to travel to places, perhaps to Antarctica or to Iceland to catch last glimpses of the last glaciers, you are being gripped by the unique-to-our-times emotion morbique.

Dina Gachman, author of the Smithsonian piece, inspired by the bureau and tormented by the likely plight of some beautiful cow-decorated meadows she loves, came up with yonderlonging, feelings of pre-mourning for a wide open space you fear will soon disappear.

*A shamefaced confession, my pants threatening to catch fire unless I come clean. The word hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is not a typical everyday adornment of any mighty, superior-to-Shakespeare's vocabulary of my own. I only came across the unusual word this week in a review of a new book about phobias. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia turns out to be a phobic fear of long words. Now, in reverent imitation of Shakespeare's devotion to only usual words, I promise never to use that labyrinthian word again.