The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Shakespeare and the bible
Why is english so strange?

Nowadays there are over a billion people in the world who speak English, but back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain there were only around five million. Yet from that small number came some of the greatest writers in the English language.

One was the playwright and actor William Shakespeare, who lived from 1564 to 1616. He wrote hundreds of poems and nearly forty plays, among them some of the most famous plays ever written—Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the list goes on. Even if you’ve never seen or read any of Shakespeare’s plays, I bet you’ll know some of the lines he wrote, because they are quoted everywhere—lines like “parting is such sweet sorrow”; “to be or not to be, that is the question”; “the game is up” and “good riddance!” (Ring any bells?)

Because Modern English was such a quickly growing language when Shakespeare was alive, there are also hundreds of totally new words that were published for the first time in his plays. Words like bedazzle, unearthly, madcap, bloodstained, watchdog—and that’s just a few of them. Some people think that Shakespeare may have invented these words himself—or it may be that he was just the first to write down words he heard people using around him. Whatever the case, Shakespeare’s passion for English and his dazzling ability to turn words into rich, unforgettable stories and characters has made him the most loved writer in the history of the language. His work is read over and over again, and has become part of all our lives, whether we know it or not.

The other writers from that early time who had a huge impact on how we speak and write English today were actually translators—people who change one language into another. How could they be so important? Well, it’s because what they translated was the Bible.

The Bible, of course, was not originally in English, but in the ancient languages of Hebrew and Greek. As Christianity spread, the monks translated it into Latin, the language used in schools and universities. But then the idea began that it should be translated into English so that ordinary people (who didn’t happen to know Hebrew or Greek or Latin) would be able to understand it.

Well, that probably sounds like a good plan to you, but many church leaders were against it. They thought that only educated people could truly understand the Bible, so it should stay in Latin or its original languages. In the sixteenth century, anyone who tried to translate the Bible into English could be arrested. The most gifted of these translators was a man called William Tyndale. He was arrested, put in prison, and even executed in 1536. (Amazingly, he was so committed to his work he asked if he could have his Hebrew Bible, dictionary, and grammar book in prison so he could keep on translating!)

As time passed, luckily the church leaders changed their minds and decided it wasn’t such a bad idea to have the Bible in English. So people were allowed to translate it without getting executed, and quite a few English Bibles were published. A few too many, really, as some of them were not very good. People were getting confused with so many different versions around. Finally, in 1611, during the reign of King James I, it was decided to get all the translations together and pick the best bits to make one extra-special official Bible that could be put in every church in the country. Known as the King James Bible, this became the regular Bible used by English speakers for at least the next 300 years.

The King James Bible is largely based on the translation of William Tyndale, who transformed the ancient foreign languages into dignified, astonishing, mysterious English. Like Shakespeare, the King James Bible has been so loved, and read so many times over and over again, that thousands of its strange and beautiful phrases have become part of how we speak, think, and write. Here are just a few of the hundreds of expressions that have come to us in English via Hebrew and Greek from the King James Bible.

As old as the hills

By the skin of your teeth

A drop in the bucket

At your wits’ end

From strength to strength

Let there be light

The salt of the earth

Bite the dust

Hello, dear Word Snoops. Did you figure out the secret message in the last chapter? Below is the next part, but of course you have to decipher the special code first. See how you do . . . (Hint: I wonder if any pesky silent letters have snuck into these words.)