Renaissance Words PDF

# 15 Turning water into wine ## Renaissance words This chapter focuses on lexis and looks at how EModE dramatically expanded its word stock, partly by borrowing and partly by using 'native resources', including affixation and compounding. Some societies, and some people in them, have strong views a...

# 15 Turning water into wine ## Renaissance words This chapter focuses on lexis and looks at how EModE dramatically expanded its word stock, partly by borrowing and partly by using 'native resources', including affixation and compounding. Some societies, and some people in them, have strong views about taking words from other languages. Think of what arguments might be put forward for and against the heavy borrowing of words from foreign languages. What effects will the introduction of many loanwords have on the borrowing language? EModE views on this will be discussed in 15.2. Section 15.4.1 looks at how affixes can develop new words. Suffixes can be used to form words of various parts of speech. Think of a few PDE suffixes which are used to form: adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs. If possible (which it may not always be) consider the 'meanings' which your suffixes convey. Among the authors mentioned in this chapter are Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser. Find out something about them and their works. Another person mentioned is Richard Mulcaster (he also came up in 13.2 and 14.1). Find out something about him. ## 15.1 'Curvets' and 'two-like' triangles The picture of English painted in Chapter 13 was of a language struggling for recognition. Latin, you will recall from 13.2, was described by Richard Taverner as a 'wine-like' language, while English was seen as barbarous and 'water-like'. The inadequacies of English, we saw, were twofold. One was the lack of standardization, and Chapter 14 showed how that was being addressed. The second was an impoverished vocabulary. This chapter is about what steps were taken to develop the lexis so that it was adequate for the new demands that were being made on it - steps to help change English from 'water-like' to 'wine-like'. In this section we will look at two types of solution. We have already come across both of them in relation to OE and ME lexical development. Now we see them put to work in the context of EModE. Thomas Bedingfield was born in Norfolk, probably in the early 1540s. As a young man he went to London and became a translator of books from Italian into English. His specialization was a genre popular at the time, called 'courtesy literature' - books which taught skills and good manners to courtiers: self-improvement books for Renaissance gentlemen. In 1584 he translated a book about horse riding, written by a famous Italian equestrian, Claudio Corte. Bedingfield's translation met with a problem. Many of the specialist horse-riding terms used in Italian did not have English equivalents. Bedingfield comes clean about this a number of times. For example, here is the heading for his Chapter 15: 'Of that motion which the Italians call Corvette or Pesate, whereof in our language there is not (for aught I know) any proper term yet devised'. And here is Chapter 3's heading: 'How to teach your horse in the figure like unto a snail, which Master Claudio calleth Caragolo or Lumaca'. What the Italian words caragolo and lumaca express is a half-turn to the left or right. But what to call these things in English? The problem was a very common one at the time. It was also faced by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde. His claim to fame, incidentally, was that he introduced the mathematical symbols '=' and '+'. In 1551 he wrote *The Pathway of Knowledge*, a translation of part of Euclid's book on geometry called *Elements*. Recorde claimed that his was the first geometry book written in English. It was not surprising, then, that he had to decide how to refer to various concepts which had names in Greek and Latin but not necessarily in English. For example, he needed to talk about triangles where 'two sides be equal and the third unequal, which the Greekes call Isosceles'. How to say this in English? Similarly with 'rectangle', and 'tangent' (a straight line touching a curve). Of course, today we use the Greek- and Latin-based words, isosceles, rectangle and tangent. But these words were not in use before Recorde's time. Bedingfield and Recorde explored different solutions to their lexical problems. Bedingfield's approach was to bring the Italian terms into English. Throughout his book, he speaks about corvettes (the leaping, frisking movements that a horse makes). He even makes an English verb out of the Italian word, talking on one occasion of to corvette and on another of corvetting. He also gives an explanation of the word, to help readers understand it – a very useful thing to do when introducing a foreign word: 'Corvetta is that motion, which the crow maketh, when... she leapeth and jumpeth upon the ground: for Corvo in the Italian tongue signifieth a crow, and a leap in that sort is called Corvetta'. His solution works, and the word does in fact enter the English language, though the form changes to curvet. Shakespeare uses the word a few times, and it remained in use until the nineteenth century. Bedingfield's caragollo lasted even longer. By the mid seventeenth century it had become caracol, and it is still used today in dressage. Bedingfield borrows, but Recorde has another solution. He mentions the Greek word isosceles. But then he goes on to say of the triangles that 'in English tweyleke may they be called'. Twe means 'two', and leke (like) signifies that the triangle has two equal sides. It is a 'two-like' triangle. For 'rectangle' he invents the term long square, and his word for 'tangent 'is touch line. So rather than borrowing Latin or Greek words, he creates new phrases or compounds. Though new, they are based on already-existing English words. As we saw in 9.2, Bedingfield's type of solution was very common in ME, while using native resources (like Recorde) was favoured in OE times. EModE used both solutions in profusion, and, as we are about to see, there was much debate for and against both of these vocabulary enlargement strategies. # 15.2 To borrow or not to borrow: the inkhorn controversy Elizabethan England was an outward-looking society, very open to the innovation which exploration brought. There were linguistic consequences. Raleigh came back to Elizabeth's court laden with potatoes and tobacco, with new words for these, from the Spanish *patata* and *tabaco*. The English travelling in France returned with words like *bigot*, *bizarre* and *entrance*. When they came back from Italy, they imported *balcony* and *violin*. But by far the largest number of loan-words in the period came from Latin, a language with high status and authority. According to one estimate, as many as 13,000 Latin-based words entered English between 1575 and 1675. For many, the borrowing was out of control, and satirists of the age lost no time in making fun of the excesses. Ben Jonson does this in a particularly vivid way. His play *The Poetaster* (first performed in 1601) has a character named Crispinus. He is given an emetic by Horace which makes him vomit words most of which have Latin roots. Here they are (in order of vomiting): * retrograde, reciprocall, incubus, glibbery, lubricall, defunct, magnificate, spurious, snotteries, chilblaind, clumsie, barmy, froth, puffy, inflate, turgidous, ventosity, oblatrant, obcaecate, furibund, fatuate, strenuous, conscious, prorumped, clutch, tropologicall, anagogical, loquacious, pinnosity, obstupefact. Nearly all these words are in the OED, though a few of them have Jonson's play as their only citation. If you have access to the OED, you might like to look some of them up. What is particularly interesting is how many of these words are still in use today. To some extent, our language still 'vomits Latin', or, to put it in a more positive and genteel fashion, still benefits from a rich vein of Latin words. Then there is the character of Don Adriano de Armado in Shakespeare's play *Love's Labour's Lost*. He is a boastful Spanish knight who wants to impress everyone by showing how well he knows the king, and what the king gets up to. Here is what he says: Sir, it is the King's most sweet pleasure and affection to congratulate the Princess at her pavilion in the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon. Armado's *congratulate* is from the Latin *congratulari*, and is being used here to mean 'pay respects to'. But what particularly delights Armado's listeners is his bizarre way of describing the afternoon as the posteriors of the day, and it still seems bizarre to us today. *Posterior* came from Latin into English early in the sixteenth century. Armado is using it to mean 'later part', but then, as now, it could refer to the 'later part' of the body: the buttocks. Little wonder that Armado's pageboy should say about his master and friends: 'They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.' 'Posteriors of this day' is one such scrap. Excessive borrowings of this sort led to a debate that goes under the name of the 'Inkhorn Controversy'. An 'inkhorn' is an inkwell, and 'inkhorn terms' were strange and obscure words, often used by scholars (the 'inkhorn' connection), and generally borrowed into English from foreign tongues. On one side of the controversy were those who regarded foreign borrowings as useful additions to the language. Those against thought that imports made, as we saw in 13.3, what the clergyman Ralph Lever rather colourfully calls 'a mingle mangle' of English. For Lever and many others, the alternative to a mingle mangle was to 'devise understandable terms, compounded of true and ancient English words'. Before reading the next paragraph, take a look at CW15.1 (To borrow, or not to borrow). It contains some quotations from writers on both sides of the Inkhorn Controversy, and allows you to see for yourself the kinds of arguments put forward. It also contains one voice from a later age - George Orwell, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist. He is there to show that the borrowing issue lived on. His point of view is that bad writers use foreign words in an effort to sound 'grand'. Even into recent times, there are some cultures with national organizations (like the French Academy in France, discussed in 19.2.1), which encourage the avoidance of loanwords from other languages. Many ages and many countries have their own version of the Inkhorn Controversy. If you would like to see another example of 'inkhorn language', look at CW15.2 (A sacerdotal dignitee). It shows a letter so full of 'inkhorn' that it is extremely difficult to understand. # 15.3 Borrowed words It must have been extremely unsettling for the Elizabethans to find their language suddenly flooded with masses of new words. Perhaps it is something like - only on a much larger scale - the invasion of new words and expressions that technology, computers and the internet have brought into today's English: gigabytes and apps, lists that are 'populated', screens that are 'touch-enabled', https, ISPs, tweets and Twitter. Things could be made to feel a little less unsettling for the EModE public if the new words were 'anglicized' a little. Activity 15A (Anglicizing Latin words) explores ways in which this was done. Take a look before reading on. There were, it is true, a few Latin words which stayed as they were when imported. Shakespeare, for example, uses the noun *augur* (from the Latin *augur*) in the sense of 'soothsayer', and Jonson uses it as a verb. The activity includes several other examples of words imported without change. But normally some modification was made. Often the original Latin ending would be dropped. The verb *expunge*, for example, is the Latin verb *expungere* without the Latin ending, and *imitate* is from Latin *imitatus*, meaning 'copied'. In the same way, the adjective *immature* is Latin *immaturus* without the adjective ending, and the noun *invitation* is from *invitationem*. Instead of being dropped, some Latin suffixes developed English equivalents. So the -*ence* at the end of *transcendence* is the -*entia* of Latin *transcendentia*. Another example is the Latin ending -*abilis* which became -*able* in English. So Latin *inviolabilis* became English *inviolable*. And Latin -*ia* (from Greek) could become -*y*. *Parodia* and *anarchia* are examples in the activity. *Commentary* comes from Latin *commentarius*, with -*ius* changed to -*y*. To digress for a moment: a few minutes exploration in the OED, or some other dictionary giving etymologies, will reveal what interesting histories many words have. Elyot (one of the 'pro-borrowing' supporters mentioned in CW15.1) uses *commentary* to mean 'notebook' or 'collection of notes'. It is originally associated with the Latin word *commentum* which meant 'invention' or 'interpretation', and gives us our word *comment*. An odd occurrence that sometimes happens is that you find two different versions of the same word, both coming from the same Latin source. For example, in Shakespeare's *Troilus and Cressida*, a character talks about actions which *conduce* ('lead to') hot passions. But in another Shakespeare play, *All's Well That Ends Well*, someone is *conducted* to a lodging. Both verbs come from the Latin *conducere*, which means 'to lead'. *Conduce* is *conducere* without the -*re*, and *conduct* is *conductus* ('led') without the -*us*. Both *conduct* and *conduce* remain in PDE. It is common for Latin loanwords to change not just their form but also their grammar or their meaning. For example, the noun *dislocation* (when a bone is displaced, possibly from Latin *dislocationem*) had been in use since 1400, but the verb *dislocate* is used perhaps for the first time in Shakespeare's *King Lear*. In a violent argument with his wife, one character in the play talks about his hands being able to 'dislocate and tear [her] flesh and bones'. We will talk much more, in 15.4.2, about another change, whereby verbs become nouns. As for changing meaning, here is another Shakespearean example. When Othello asks that his wife Desdemona should be allowed to come with him on a military expedition to Cyprus, he insists that she should have 'such *accommodation* as levels with her breeding'. She must, in other words, be given somewhere suitable to lodge. We use the word *accommodation* in the same sense today. The word had come into the language earlier in the sixteenth century, but it meant 'the process of adaptation'. Attempts to 'anglicize' foreign loans will have helped the population to come to terms with the greatly expanding vocabulary. Another source of help were the 'dictionaries of hard words' that came into existence. One example was Robert Cawdrey's 1604 *Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words*. You can find this online at www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/cawdrey/cawdrey0.html. You may like to amuse yourself by looking up these words on Cawdrey's list and finding out what they meant: *adustion*, *cibaries*, *domicelles*, *to pese*, *thwite*. It is informative to look through Cawdrey and see the large number of words that are in normal use today but which clearly caused Renaissance readers problems. Cawdrey's dictionary, and others like it, are discussed later in 19.2.2. But in spite of efforts to help, many people were left struggling with the influx of strange words. 'Strange' is what they truly were. As we will see in the next section, EModE had many new coinages based on already-existing words. Although such words were new, people had some chance of understanding them, because they contained familiar elements. But foreign words could be totally strange, unlike any other words people had ever seen before. A person who only knew English would have nothing to 'latch onto' when coming across these words. Take a look at CW15.3 (Speaking 'eloquente englysshe'). It contains a story that shows just this, about a student who wanted his shoes mended. No wonder people made mistakes. John Hart, a spelling reformer who died in 1574, puts it like this: borrowing, he says, 'causeth many of the countrymen to speak chalk for cheese, and so nickname [misname] such strange terms as it pleaseth many well to hear them'. The examples he gives of the kinds of mistakes people make with words of Romance origin include *dispense* for *suspense*, *defend* for *offend*, or *stature* for *statute*. Dramatists were quick to pick up on the comic potentiality of characters who 'speak chalk for cheese'. What we now call *malapropisms* ('the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one' is part of the *Shorter Oxford English Dictionary's* definition) are a common form of wit, especially in Shakespeare. The word comes from the character of Mrs Malaprop in Richard Sheridan's play *The Rivals*, first performed in 1775. So when she says a character is 'as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile', she means *alligator*, not *allegory*. Another term for malapropisms is 'dogberryisms' after the name of Constable Dogberry, in Shakespeare's *Much Ado about Nothing*. Here is how Dogberry tells the Governor about the capture of two shady individuals by his night watch patrol: our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two aspicious persons, and we would have them this morning examined before your worship. He means apprehended, not comprehended, and suspicious, not auspicious (or aspicious as he says it). Schlauch (1965) classified malapropisms according to which part of the word has been 'misplaced'. Activity 15B (Indited to dinner) asks you to think about her classification, and also gives you the chance to explore some more malapropisms. If you are going to look at this, now is the time to do so, since the following paragraph includes the 'answers'. Schlauch identifies three main types of malapropism. Sometimes a mistake is made with the prefix, as when (in ii) Slender says decrease instead of increase. The second type is when a suffix is mistaken, as when Mistress Quickly says infinitive for infinite (example iii). In the third type, the roots of words are confused. Elbow's use of *cardinally* for *carnally* is like this (in iv), and so is Mistress Quickly's *indite* for *invite* (in i). The use of *deflowered* for *devoured* (in v) is the same. If you find working out malapropisms fun, there are five more in CW15.4 (A honeysuckle villain). Malapropisms are alive and kicking today. Here are two from George Bush, US president from 2001 to 2009. On one occasion he said: 'I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well'. And on another: 'We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile'. Perhaps he meant *reserving* instead of *preserving*. Certainly, for *predecessors* read 'successors', and for *hostile*, 'hostage'. # 15.4 Native resources A way to increase the vocabulary without creating a 'mingle mangle', and avoiding the risk of 'speaking chalk for cheese', was to follow the OE procedure of using 'native resources' to develop new words. The resources we looked at in 5.2 were affixation and compounding. We will look at these two processes again here, and will add a third. ## 15.4.1 Affixes Affixation, a common means of word formation in both OE and EModE, remains popular today. Take the prefix *un-* as an example. If you approve of something you see on the popular social medium, Facebook, there is a 'like' button to press. Then, if you change your mind, you can press the 'unlike' button - to unlike it. The social networking sites have created other *un-* verbs. As we saw in 5.1, if you go off a Facebook friend, you unfriend them, and there is even a new noun to go with the new verb: you can describe someone as an unfriend. Then there is *unfollow*, and even *unfan*. The *un-* prefix was also popular in EModE. One of Shakespeare's examples comes when Lady Macbeth is steeling herself for the murder of King Duncan. She asks the spirits to fill her with cruelty: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. (1.5.38) 'Take away my female qualities' is what she means. There are several other striking new *un-* words in Shakespeare. In *Richard II*, Gaunt hopes that his 'death's sad tale may yet undeaf the king's ear'. Then there is the character in *The Merry Wives of Windsor* who has made a fool of himself, and asks whether there is any way to unfool himself, while in *Macbeth*, the Porter's piece of wisdom is that, when it comes to lechery, alcohol both provokes and unprovokes - it 'provokes / the desire but it takes away the performance'. According to one estimate, Shakespeare uses 314 new *un-* words, and that is just one affix in just one writer's work. Activity 15C (Un-) looks at some more EModE words, this time from sources other than Shakespeare. Take a look also at CW15.5 (Out-Heroding Herod), which is about another of Shakespeare's favourite prefixes: *out-*. You may remember from 5.2.2 that while prefixes change meaning, they do not change a word's part of speech. It is true that suffixes do not always change the part of speech: they can be used, for example, to make a new noun out of an already-existing one. But they can also change the part of speech. Before reading on, do Activity 15D (Some popular suffixes), which looks at a few of the suffixes common in EModE. Two of the suffixes in the activity - *-ness* and *-itude* are used to form nouns. The *-ness* in *filthyness* changes the adjective *filthy* into an abstract noun. The suffix *-itude* is also used to form abstract nouns, often expressing a state or quality. The activity's example is *servitude*: a word which may have been first used by Caxton in the fifteenth century, with the suffix coming ultimately from the Latin *-itudo*. The activity also has two examples of suffixes used to form adjectives. Shakespeare's *vasty* means the same as 'vast', and the -*y* may have been added to give the word an extra syllable to help the rhythm of the poetry. We do of course use the suffix today, often changing a noun into an adjective and often meaning 'having the quality of' or 'full of' - as in *snowy*. A suffix we came across in CW5.2 is *-ly*, which was described as a 'prolific formative'. It is the only suffix in Activity 15D used to form an adverb (*palely*). This is an 'adverb of manner'; CW5.2 is again the place to look to be reminded what that is. Sentence (iv) in the activity has two examples of the suffix *-ize* (*ciuillize* and *aguize*, meaning 'adorn'), also very common in PDE. It can mean to 'make' or 'turn into' - so a rough paraphrase of *civilize* might be 'to make civil'. Here, *-ize* is added to an adjective. If you would like to see more EModE suffixes at work, CW15.6 (More EModE suffixes) is the place to go. In 5.2.2 our example of how useful affixes can be in extending the language showed the OE verb *habban* and the various OE words created from it by affixation. Affixes proved similarly useful in EModE, and many examples could be given showing large numbers of new words developing out of some noun or verb. As a modest example, take the word *direful*, mentioned in CW15.6. It comes from the adjective *dire*, which has an OED first citation in 1567. If you have access to the OED online, look up *dire*, and use the box on the right-hand side of the screen to find other words with this root. There are at least four appearing within fifty years of *dire*, and the number increases if you look up these four words and find some of their own derivatives. All these words have disappeared from the language, except as archaisms. If you do not have access to the OED online, you can find these words in the Answer section (AS). ## 15.4.2 Another use of native resources This section starts with an activity. Before reading, look at Activity 15E (Weirding language). In the 1980s and 90s, the American cartoonist Bill Watterson produced a cartoon strip about the adventures of Calvin, a six-year-old boy, and his stuffed tiger toy, Hobbes. In one cartoon, Calvin announces that he likes to 'verb words. I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed'. He concludes by introducing his own new verb: 'verbing weirds language', he says. But Tiger Hobbes gets quite irritated at Calvin's 'verbing'. In fact, irritation is a common reaction to this linguistic process. Quite recently some sports writers started using the noun *podium* as a verb. To *podium* means to win a medal at a games meeting. Here's the reaction of one blogger: 'these linguistic absurdities continue, aided and abetted by the network people. The latest is truly bizarre, from the Olympic coverage: “She was unable to podium." Arrrrgh. Grrrrr. Comment unnecessary'. Like many procedures that enrich the language, 'verbing' can cause many such reactions from those who feel that the result is a 'mingle mangle'. EModE writers often take 'a thing' and 'verb it'. Example (i) in Activity15E shows this. *Lip* started life as a noun in OE, but Chapman – writing in 1605 – is using it as a verb. In fact, along with Shakespeare, he was possibly one of the first to do so. This process of changing one part of speech into another without adding a prefix or suffix (a noun to a verb in this case) is called *functional shift*, or *conversion*. It was a popular lexical development strategy in the sixteenth century, and there was a linguistic reason which partly explains this. As we saw at various points in Chapter 6, OE used suffixes to show what part of speech a word was. Thus the OE for 'lip' was *lippa*, with the -*a* suffix indicating that the word was a noun. If a verb 'to lip' had existed in Anglo-Saxon times, it might have been *lippan*, with a different suffix - the verbal *-an*. Different endings for different parts of speech tended to make functional shift difficult. But as grammatical suffixes began to disappear from the language, it became a little easier to 'convert' words from one part of speech to another. The EModE *lip* carries no suffix to mark it as a noun or verb, so it could be used as both. In this case, the conversion was 'noun → verb'. Before reading on, go through all the examples in Activity 15E indicating the part of speech changes that are involved. Example (i) in the activity (*lip*) involves one of the most common shifts, 'noun → verb'. (ii) (*whisper*) has the conversion working the other way round, with the verb *whisper* becoming a noun. In example (iii), the adjective *mellow* changes into a verb. An adjective – *grievous* – is also the starting-point in (iv), but here it changes into what is called an *intensifier* a class of words like *very* and *really* which give additional force to the adjective *sick* in the case of (iv). Example (v) is particularly interesting. Here, the words *grace* and *uncle* are turned into verbs - very curious conversions indeed. We sometimes use similarly curious conversions in PDE, especially to indicate anger (which is what York is indicating in the Shakespeare sentence). Here is a recent example taken from an internet blog: Child: Mum, PLEASE let me go to the cinema Mum: Oooh! I'll cinema you in a minute You may be able to think of some more PDE examples using this 'I'll X him (her, you)' formula. It is one found in EModE. In Shakespeare's play *The Merry Wives of Windsor*, a character named Ford comes face to face with an old woman, Mother Prat, whom he hates. 'I'll *prat* her', he says, and proceeds to beat her with a stick. If you want more examples of EModE conversions, take a look at CW15.7 (Coffining the corpse), which gives five more. These shifts can have a startling effect. CW15.8 (*Shakespeare and electroencephalograms*) describes a fascinating neurological experiment which measured the effect of functional shifts on brain activity. ## 15.4.3 Compounds By the time he reaches Act 5, Shakespeare's hero, Macbeth, is really sick at heart. 'I have lived long enough', he gloomily says. He has nothing to look forward to in his old age. People will hate him, and be superficially polite to him out of fear: that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have, but in their stead Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not *Mouth-honour* well captures the idea of people showing respect in words but not actions. The word is probably a Shakespearean creation. It is a compound noun, and compounds were as popular in EModE as they had been in OE (5.2.1 is where the OE ones were discussed). To give you some idea of how many compounds there are in Shakespeare: mouth-honour is in the 24th line of *Macbeth*, Act 5, Scene 3, and it is already the scene's fifth compound. You can use the internet to provide further evidence of their popularity. Find the text of a play or poem written in the period – it could be Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson (if you want the titles of their works, look these authors up on the internet). Once you have found the online version of a work, use your computer's 'Find' facility to search for hyphens ('-'). Of course, not all the hits you get will be compounds, but many will be. If the work is lengthy, you will find dozens, even hundreds, of them. Incidentally, not all writers use a hyphen to mark a compound. It happens to be *mouth-honour*, but it might just as well have been *mouth honour*. You also find compounds made up of two words joined into one word without a hyphen. Marlowe has *fire-works*, but today we write *fireworks*. Sometimes it is fairly obvious what a new compound means. Here are some 'heart-based' compounds, all with first OED citations in the sixteenth century: *kind-hearted* (1535), *gentle-hearted* (1595), *heart-breaking* (1591), *heart-wounding* (1599). Shakespeare has a little rash of -hearted compounds in his play Henry VI, Part 3: *hard-hearted*, *gentle-hearted*, *soft-*, *sad-* and *proud-hearted*. All easy to understand even if you have not come across them before. But in the hands of the right author, the compounds can be very imaginative and thought-provoking - comparable indeed to the OE kennings we discussed in 7.3. So in Shakespeare's *Henry VI, Part 3*, old age is described as *chair-days* (days spent largely sitting in a chair), and in his *Measure for Measure*, the blood of the cruel ruler is called *snow-broth* (a soup made of snow). Activity 15F (Belly-cheers and scrape-pennies) contains some compounds used by EModE writers, and invites you to think about how they might be categorized, the topic of the next few paragraphs. Look now at all parts of the activity. In EModE, the most common new compounds were nouns or adjectives. One way of classifying these is in terms of the combination of the parts of speech involved. Many nouns were nouns joined to other nouns (N+N). Alongside Shakespeare's *mouth-honour* and *snow-broth* we have *fire-works*, *companion-prince*, and the activity's *belly-cheer* ('gratification of the stomach'), all used by Shakespeare's contemporary, Marlowe. Noun compounds can also have a verbal element ('V+N' or 'N+V'). *Lack-love* and *scrape-penny* ('miser') are examples from the activity. As for adjectives, the verb forms ending in -*ing* (the present participle suffix) and -*ed* (the past participle suffix) were particularly popular. A widow in Shakespeare's *Richard III* is described as a *care-crazed* mother in one line, and as *beauty-waning* in the next - she was losing her looks. Jonson used *wool-gathering* and *double-tongued*. Another popular combination (not shown in the activity) was 'N+Adj'. You find *blood-raw* in Marlowe and *thread-bare* in Spenser. In fact, compounds can involve almost any part of speech, and some EModE ones sound very odd today. In Shakespeare there is *hence-departure*, *here-remain*, *back-return*, and some longer ones like *to-and-fro-conflicting* and *always-wind-changing*. In *Love's Labour's Lost*, one character talks about making a *world-without-end* bargain. There are many ways in which the two parts of a compound can relate to each other in terms of meaning. In *Romeo and Juliet*, the heroine's body is described as *tempest-tossed* - meaning a body tossed 'by a tempest'. But when someone in *Macbeth* is called *trumpet-tongued*, it is because his tongue 'is like (as loud as) a trumpet'. The 'milk-compounds' you saw in part (b) of Activity 15F show the variety of meaning relationships that can be involved. A *milkmaid* is 'a maid who milks cows'; the *milksops* are sops 'comprised of milk'; the *milkpaps* are breasts 'containing milk'. As for adjectives, *milk-white* refers to the colour of milk, but when a character in *King Lear* is described as *milk-livered*, it refers to the weak, benign quality of the liquid, not its colour. Incidentally, and just to suggest how common vivid compounds are throughout Shakespeare, nine lines before *milk-livered* in *King Lear*, a *head-lugged* bear has been mentioned. This is a bear that has been baited by being dragged by the head. Activity 15F, part (c) gives some examples of how compounds were used. Description of nature is one such use. As well as *lazy-puffing* clouds, Shakespeare has *heaven-kissing* hills, *fearful-hanging* rocks, *fen-sucked* fogs. Spenser describes elms as *vine-prop* (an adjective meaning 'supporting vines'), and has his own version of Homer's 'rosy-fingered dawn' (it is *rosy-fingred* Morning). Sometimes word combinations are semantically unusual. Shakespeare describes one character as *dumb-discoursive*. *Discoursive* means 'communicative' - almost the opposite of dumb; what he means is 'silent and yet communicative'. Similarly, Spenser has *foole-happie*. As we have seen with Shakespeare's *lack-love* and Lodge's *scrape-penny*, compounds are particularly useful as insults. Look back to the last lines of the 'buckrom story'