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It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. As it appears only once in Shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon in the Shakespeare canon. At 27 letters, it is the longest word in the English language to strictly alternate between consonants and vowels. [1]
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, [223] and his use of language helped shape modern English. [224] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language , the first serious work of its type. [ 225 ]
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
A bugbear is a legendary creature or type of hobgoblin comparable to the boogeyman (or bugaboo or babau or cucuy), and other creatures of folklore, all of which were historically used in some cultures to frighten disobedient children.
It is often even misquoted as simply "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" (or even more sloppy approximations like "conformity is a bugbear of small-minded people", etc.). Here's the quotation in longer form, with more of its original context.
Shakespeare's writing features extensive wordplay of double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes. [27] Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. His works have been considered controversial through the centuries for his use of bawdy punning, [ 28 ] to the extent that "virtually every play is shot through with sexual puns."
During the second half of the 20th century, the prescriptivist tradition of usage commentators started to fall under increasing criticism. Thus, works such as the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, appearing in 1993, attempt to describe usage issues of words and syntax as they are actually used by writers of note, rather than to judge them by standards derived from logic, fine ...