Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book)
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How would we make love had Shakespeare not given us the words embrace, courtship, undress, and kissing? Where would our economy be without employer, manager, investment, andretirement? Where would religion be without pious and sanctimonious? Where would journalism be without reword, misquote, and critic? Where would criticism be without fashionable, monumental, and worthless? And where would all of English literature be had Shakespeare not given us such simple and beautiful words as gloomy, hurry, generous, unaware, and lonely?
Shakespeare was also the English language’s greatest phrasemaker: “There has never been anyone to match him,” says Bill Bryson in The Mother Tongue. For ever and a day (Taming of the Shrew), Shakespeare laid it on with a trowel (As You Like It) and showed us in one fell swoop (Macbeth) and with no apparent foul play (King John) what it was like to be in a pickle (The Tempest), to be fancy-free (Midsummer Night’s Dream), to beggar all description (Antony and Cleopatra), to be eaten out of house and home (Henry IV, Part 2), and to wear your heart on your sleeve (Othello). With the milk of human kindness (Macbeth) he took us on a wild goose chase (Romeo and Juliet), gave us short shrift (Richard III), and sent us packing (Henry IV, Part I). He made our hair stand on end (Hamlet) because he was as merry as the day is long (Much Ado About Nothing) and as pure as the driven snow (The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth). Surely his words will never become too much of a good thing (As You Like It) or vanish into thin air (Othello).
And that’s the long and the short of it—an idiom that the Bard, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, originally wrote as “this is the short and the long of it.” As the 19th-century Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde dryly observed, “Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.”
From WORD WORKOUT: BUILDING A MUSCULAR VOCABULARY IN 10 EASY STEPS © 2014 by Charles Harrington Elster. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.
About the Authors
CHARLES HARRINGTON ELSTER is a writer, editor, broadcaster, voice talent, and a nationally recognized authority on the English language. He is the author of eleven books, including Verbal Advantage, The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly, and a second vocabulary-building novel for high school students, Test of Time: A Novel Approach to the SAT and ACT. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. For five and a half years he cohosted a weekly public radio talk show on language called A Way with Words. Mr. Elster, who has a B.A. from Yale (where he became friends with Joseph Elliot), has lived in San Diego since 1981. Please visit his website at www.charlesharringtonelster.com.
JOSEPH ELLIOT is a poet, book artist, publisher and teacher. For many years, he co-edited A Musty Bone and then Situations, both chapbook series based in NYC, and hosted a weekly reading series at Biblios bookstore in lower Manhattan. He is the author of numerous chapbooks, artist books, and collaborations, including If It Rained Here, 15 Clanking Radiators, Half Gross, and Object Lessons, and of two full-length collections of poetry, Opposable Thumb and Homework. Mr. Elliot, who received a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University, teaches English at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and three boys.