The influence of Shakespeare on everyday English

Why do we have a lesson on a writer who died hundreds of years ago? Don’t worry. There’s method to my madness! The poet and playwright William Shakespeare has had a big influence on the English language. Many of he words and expressions that he invented are still in use today, and we often don’t realize it. In this lesson, I will introduce you to some of the most common expressions which first appeared in print hundreds of years ago and are still used today. So come on. Break the ice, and watch the lesson! TRANSCRIPT Hi. This is Gill at , and today, we’re going to be looking at the way William Shakespeare, the English playwright and poet, has influenced everyday English today. He wrote a lot of plays and quite a lot of poems, and some of the lines from those poems and plays have been used in the English language because they were very influential. So... And the way he said things was just very good at expressing something. It may have been that people around him were saying all these things, and that it was just... He was the one to put them down in print, but looking back through all the old books, Shakespeare was the first person to mention all of these. These are just a few examples. He was the first person to put these actual phrases and words into print. So maybe he heard other people saying them, but he was the one who wrote them down. Okay? So, let’s have a look through the list. So... Oh, and there are his dates just to show you how long ago he lived. He was born in 1564, died in 1616, so a long, long time ago. So it’s quite amazing, really, that some of what he wrote is actually used in the English language today. So let’s have a look. So, first of all: “a sorry sight“. Okay? So, if you see somebody walking along and they... Maybe they’ve been caught in the rain or something, or they’ve fallen over into the mud and they’ve got all their clothes dirty, the look terrible, they haven’t eaten for two days and they look absolutely awful, you could say: “That poor man, he is a sorry sight.“ “Sorry“ meaning sort of sad. You feel sorry for him, looking at him. He looks really dishevelled, very dirty, tired, hungry. “A sorry sight“. Okay. Next one: “wearing your heart on your sleeve“. Okay? Now, this is your sleeve and here is your heart. Your heart is inside here. But if you wear your heart on your sleeve, this is a kind of a metaphor, or an idiom, an expression for showing how you’re feeling. Not hiding your feelings, but making it clear how you feel. So maybe if you’ve fallen in love with somebody and instead of sort of keeping it to yourself and keeping it a secret, you sort of make it quite obvious to them, probably in a very embarrassing way. But if you make it very obvious to them that you... That you love them, you’re wearing your heart on your sleeve. Okay? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, so worth a try if you think so, but I don’t know. Okay, so that’s what that means. Right? “In a pickle“, if you’re in a pickle, you’re in trouble. And “pickle“ is a kind of preservative in a jar. So it’s like vinegar or something, which preserves food. So, “vinegar“. Sometimes you get little onions in vinegar, and they’re called pickled onions. Okay? You can buy them in the supermarket. So, if you’re in a... If you, personally, are in a pickle, it means you’re in a lot of vinegar, which isn’t a very nice place to be. So that’s real trouble. You don’t want to be in a lot of vinegar. So: “in a pickle“, that’s what that means. So you have to get out of it as quickly as possible. So it means in trouble. Okay, next one: “there’s method in my madness“, and if you’ve heard of Hamlet, this comes from that play. Hamlet pretends to be mad. He’s not really mad, but he’s pretending to be mad for a certain reason, which I won’t explain now; it would take too long. You’ll notice a lot of m’s because Shakespeare is very poetic, and you get a lot of sound patterns, the same letter repeated, which makes it a stronger phrase because of that. “There’s method in my madness“ means you may be behaving in a very strange way, but there’s a good reason for it. You have a method. There is a reason for behaving like that, which hopefully, it will all work out in the end. But for Hamlet, it didn’t really work out. But I’ll leave you to find out about that if you don’t already know. So he pretends to be mad for his own reasons, but he’s not really mad. Okay. Right?