The raw materials used for the cloth were also produced in a parallel fashion to how the cloth was woven: those with money could buy nicer thread made with exotic and expensive materials (like silk) in the market, and those without could spin wool or flax at home. But it didn’t stop and start just at the weaving.
The cloth made at home was usually simpler than the cloth made for the marketplace-a loom that was able to weave complicated patterns, for instance, was often larger and much more expensive than a simple frame loom used to make plain weave. It’s true that there were guilds of weavers who turned out different kinds of cloth for those who could afford to buy it, but cloth was also commonly made at home (and particularly by those without the means to buy cloth from the weaving guilds). In Shakespeare’s day, cloth wasn’t just a commercial product. These actors aren’t just unsophisticated, but painfully so. He isn’t just calling the band of actors he’s run into rustic- hempen means “made of hemp,” and hemp was traditionally used to weave coarse cloth (like burlap) and ropes. In this scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck has just happened upon an impromptu play. 35.What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here.Ĭlothes, they say, make the man-or unmake him, as the case may be. Sorning was the 16th century equivalent of mooching or sponging, and so a sorner is someone who unappreciatively lives off other people.
Someone who constantly interrupts a conversation, typically only to contradict or correct someone else. The name soon came to be used of any buzz-killing faultfinder-an in particular someone who always finds fault in the places they visit. Part-novel, part-travelogue, Sterne’s book featured a grumblingly quarrelsome character called Smelfungus, who was modeled on Smollett.
Smollett returned home and published his Travels Through France and Italy in 1766, and in response Sterne published his Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy two years later. When Laurence Sterne (author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy) met the Scottish writer Tobias Smollett (author of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle) in Italy in 1764, he was amazed by how critical Smollett was of all the places he had visited. Someone who turns up uninvited at a meal or party and expects to be fed. Saddling geese is a proverbially pointless exercise, so anyone who wastes their time doing it-namely, a saddle-goose-must be an imbecile. You can also be a harecop, or a “hare-brained” person.Ī gaggle of geese sans saddles. Dalcop and HarecopĬop is an old word for the head, making a dalcop (literally a “dull-head”) a particularly stupid person. CumberworldĪlso called a cumberground-someone who is so useless, they just serve to take up space. BobolyneĪn old Tudor English word for a fool that was coined by the 15th-16th century poet John Skelton, one of Henry VIII’s schoolteachers. This appears to be another of Shakespeare’s inventions that became popular in Victorian slang.
Next time someone winds you up or you need to win an argument in fine style, why not try dropping one of these old-fashioned insults into your conversation? 1. So the nervous servant who tells Macbeth his castle is under attack is dismissed as a “cream-faced loon.” Oswald in King Lear isn’t just a useless idiot, he’s a “whoreson zed,” an “unnecessary letter.” Lear’s ungrateful daughter Goneril is “a plague-sore,” an “embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.” And when Falstaff doubts something Mistress Quickly has said in Henry IV: Part 1, he claims, “there’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.” (And there’s a good chance he didn’t intend “ stewed prune” to mean dried fruit.) But you don’t have to rely just on Shakespeare to spice up your vocabulary. Besides being the greatest writer in the history of the English language, William Shakespeare was the master of the pithy put-down.
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