Challenge Your Creative Writing Skills with this Devious Test

In 1585, William Shakespeare disappeared off the face of the earth for seven puzzling years. Those lost years have had scholars scouring the records for the bard’s signature but to no avail. It’s a mystery.

Where he went and what he did is as truthlessly as lost as he. We can only scratch our thick skulls in befuddlement.

To speak of his adventures during these seven years would be a work of fiction, a grand conjecture.

Those seven years were a time when the plague spread its murderous breath through London. Deaths outnumbered births. Scholars have investigated, analysed, and probed. Records are inconclusive or non-existent.

Whenceforth

Until then, William dedicated almost all of his life to studying at his local grammar school, King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon. A reputable institution providing a classical education to its students.

Schooldays began at dawn and carried through until evening with private studies keeping students up late into the night. William and his fellow pupils studied six days per week.

There was strict discipline. Whippings. Spankings. Knuckle raps. Blackboard erasers tossed across the room. Glowers. Grunts. Bullying stunts. That kind of thing, I imagine.

They taught young William to say ‘Thank you for your letter’ in 150 different ways in Latin. Through such exercises, William learned all the rhetorical devices and every wily writing strategy of the ancient authors, such as Virgil and Cicero.

William Shakespeare received a more thorough grounding in Latin rhetoric and literature than anyone completing a university degree in English Literature would today.

Wherefore art thou

My schooling wasn’t so auspicious. You couldn’t get me to read Shakespeare. Not then. I found it complicated, dreary, and dull. Even though people die — apparently.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but”

— Shakespeare, Macbeth

Thee this and art thou that. Can anyone make sense of it? Imagine writing like that in a blog.

Language evolves. Even books by Enid Blyton, written in the 1940s and 1950s, have been revised for modern audiences. Although, the people who object to characters being called Dick and Fanny need to take a good look at themselves.

Yet, I have read Shakespeare. And so have you.

We come across him all the time. He has embedded himself into the English language. His formal education may have ceased when he reached fifteen, but his reach has since spanned the centuries.

We’d be blinking idiots if we thought we could get too much of a good thing. It was all Greek to me back in school. Now I am eaten up by the green-eyed monster. I have not slept one wink thinking about this.

I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve. There’s neither rhyme nor reason for it, and it’s not the be-all or end-all, but at the risk of becoming a laughing stock, I suggest William Shakespeare didn’t melt into thin air. He was made of sterner stuff.

All highlighted words in the above two paragraphs first appeared in the works of Shakespeare.

That does not necessarily mean he coined them. He could have picked them up from somewhere that escaped our attention. But without Shakespeare, we might not know those common cliches today.

They flowed from his pen, and players voiced them. There are about 1600 words in the Oxford English Dictionary for which Shakespeare is the first citation —

• accommodation aerial amazement
• apostrophe assassination auspicious
• baseless bloody bump
• castigate changeful clangour
• control countless courtship
• critic critical dexterously
• dishearten dislocate
• dwindle emerge eventful
• exposure fitful frugal
• generous gloomy gnarled
• hurry impartial inauspicious
• indistinguishable invulnerable lapse
• laughable lonely majestic
• misplaced monumental multitudinous
• obscene palmy perusal
• pious premeditated radiance
• reliance road sanctimonious
• seamy sportive suspicious

These are but a small selection.

He invented or introduced these words, often by changing nouns into verbs (elbow, for example), combining words, adding prefixes or suffixes, and so on. Some words stuck around and some didn’t.

The Challenge

You are writing a murder mystery, and your detective is called to a murder scene that depicts an emotionless, unregretful malignity. How do you write that into your novel without using words first cited by Shakespeare?

Which means you can’t have —

Cold-blooded, remorseless savagery.

Just three of the many words Shakespeare gave us. Go on, I dare you.

And finally

The laughably sanctimonious and impossibly madcap best word Shakespeare gave us that nobody uses.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus (adj) (Hon-oar-if-ik-ab-il-it-you-din-it-at-e-bus)

Derived from the Latin honorificabilis, it means invincible, glorious, honourable.

What a wonderfully over-complicated word.

Example sentence —

“Malky will be remembered for many things, but not his honorificabilitudinitatibusitude.”

I had to add ‘itude’ (indicating a state or condition) for it to make sense. That is my contribution to the English language. Correct me if I am wrong, but this is the first-ever citation of honorificabilitudinitatibusitude.

You read it here first.