Not a hard one to figure out – if a guest is rapacious enough in their appetite and consumes everything in the pantry, then one is eaten out of the house and home and forced to go out for more supplies – hopefully having evicted the house-guest. H proved a difficult letter to find suitable phrases for, but with this one, we get the chance to consider the many phrases whose origins are ascribed to the great William Shakespeare – this particular phrase comes from Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2 Scene 1. As I said under apple of my eye, another phrase ascribed to the Bard, I cannot but help wondering, sacrilegious as it may be, whether Shakespeare originated all these phrases or was simply the first to commit them to paper. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust have no doubts though and have a webpage called Shakespeare’s Phrases which cites the phrase and the play in which it appears – make up your own minds…
Here are a few:-
“The clothes make the man” Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3
“The be all and end all” Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7
“Wild goose chase” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 4
“Brave New World” The Tempest Act 5, Scene 1.
The last one gives an example of how one phrase has been propagated – Aldous Huxley, surely a man well-educated in the Classics and Shakespeare, used “Brave New World” as the title of one of his own masterpieces which has in turn become a shortcut in any article describing utopian/dystopian paradigms but for all our familiarity with the phrase now, was it in common usage since Shakespeare and before Huxley or only a quote known to the cognoscenti, the literate class? Just as we have already encountered phrases which have multiple theories as to their origins, theories which multiply faster than rabbits in the warren of the World Wide Web (how’s that for a mixed metaphor!) – so with Shakespearean phrases, only by searching all written material and all recorded word, and counting all the occurrences could we truly know the answer…
Lastly, we have only one “H” Cant language example from Wikipedia‘s excellent article on the subject… Hijra Farsi, from South Asia, used by the hijra and kothi subcultures (traditional indigenous approximate analogues to LGBT subcultures)
I’m thinking Shakespeare didn’t make them up but was the first to write them down as you suggested. Only by repeating the words many times (as in a play) could the words and phrases become a part of the language. We have all been exposed to Shakespeare at school for hundreds of years. No wonder bits have stuck.
I agree. I think Shakespeare was an excellent observer of human behavior and likely had many opportunities to hear phrases he then brought into circulation with his plays. I think we can celebrate him rightly and widely enough for his skills as a playwright. I don’t need him to be the originator of all the myriad of phrases attributed to him.
I was a little chary of expressing this view on a sacred cow but several have agreed and nobody has disagreed yet…
Thanks for visiting Deborah.
Shakespeare was a keen observer of his times. His HAMLET was inspired by the tale of the mediaeval Danish ruler, Amleth, from Gesta Danorum a 1200 AD history of Denmark by historian Saxo Grammaticus. So, like Linda and Deborah, I believe he took the phrases he heard and weaved them into his plays to make them “live” on stage. https://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2023/04/h-is-for-c-s-lewis.html
Another one agreeing about Shakespeare – thanks for visiting…
Interesting post – I learned something new. Yay me!
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didn’t realize ‘Brave new world’ was among this Shakespearean list! And like the others, I too believe that Shakespeare observed, noted down words and phrases, and finally, actually used them somewhere where more people noticed it.. It is like when my 20 yo showed me this cool thingamajig he 3d-printed for his bike, and I told him that maybe he should patent it:) and then he told me that he saw the idea online .. so … 🙂
My post is here
Thanks for visiting – and for the story of your 20yo – what’s new in the world…