ARCANE.
Therefore, today I am letting another aspiring writer have the floor. From the site Mental Floss, here is a delightfully informative article:
21 Phrases You Use Without Realizing You're Quoting Shakespeare
Enjoy!
I shall be resting in the drawing room all day so that the healing virtue of silence can renew my befuddled and frenzied mind, because I am of the wrong gender to get me to a nunnery.
Well I understood it. I was hoping for that prize myself.
ReplyDeleteTasker, if I knew you better I would call us kindred souls.
DeleteNo nunnery for me. I live in a nice quiet part of the world. But if I need some excitement I can go to where it is.
ReplyDeleteTo a monastery?
DeleteEmma, sounds like a plan.
DeleteYorkshire Pudding, nunnery, monastery, a desert island, somewhere there's a place for us....
DeleteIn "Romeo and Juliet", Mercutio of course exclaims "A plague on both your houses!" but that is an error. In the first folio edition of the play, Shakespeare actually wrote "A brague on both your houses!" - "brague" being an arcane term for excessive jollity.
ReplyDeleteYorkshire Pudding, I like it! Alert the OED people....
DeleteDid you think that the description of "arcane" could actually be a compliment? The definition I find is: "understood by few; mysterious or secret." At least the way I see the world, that is a compliment.
ReplyDeleteBonnie, it never occurred to me. I suppose it depends on whether one is trying to communicate to the many or to the few. I'm just trying to communicate, period, and my readership will either grow or shrink. You (they) know who you (they) are....
DeleteWell, well, wee (as the Texan said as he came to a hole in the ground) I only knew that two were Shakespeare quotes: 12 and 13. I've seen/heard Hamlet so many times that I should (but, of course, do not always) know all the quotable parts off by heart. I think I'm going to enter a 'Shakespeare quoting' phase. By the way if you wany a really arcane fact did you know that in Shakespeare's time there was no "is.....ing" or "are.....ing" in the English language.
ReplyDeleteGraham, I did not know that bit of arcane linguistic information but I know it must be true, otherwise Lady Macbeth would have said, "Is this a dagger that I am seeing before me?"....
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