Posted: Jan 20, 2011 10:21 pm
Interesting about Shakespeare: he may not necessarily have coined these himself; his audience at the Globe was basically working class, and he may have incorporated common idioms in order to connect with his audience. There was a BBC series about 25 years ago (Robert Burchfield? History of the English language?) where they were looking into these, and the presenter told a story about a philologist who was researching dialects, and who was talking to two hedgers in eastern England who were describing their work, and the one said: "well I rough-hews the ends, then I gives them to 'im, an' 'e shapes 'em."
"There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may." (Hamlet).
"There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may." (Hamlet).