Jonathan Hope - "He words me girls…" Lies about words and Shakespeare
Channel: Department of English, Arizona State University
Date: 2020-02-05

Swagger, gossip, eyeball, gloomy, undress, gaping, lonely, rant, fashionable, manager, laughable, majestic, radiance, hurry, generous, frugal, critical, courtship, zany. These, and many more, are words invented by Shakespeare—as long as you believe your kids' 3rd grade teaching materials, educational TV programs, scores of popular websites, and even several major academic Shakespeare scholars, who really ought to know better. Now technology is setting the record straight, allowing us to search over a billion words from Shakespeare's time, and showing us that people swaggered, were gloomy, and had eyeballs to watch each other undressing long before Will. 

Jonathan Hope is professor of English in literature at ASU, and has published widely on Shakespeare, including a grammar of Shakespearean English, authorship attribution, and theories of language in the Renaissance.