Happy, Happy!

[the_gneech]

Happy birthday to walksamongstars and kurst! For your present, here's Today's Forgotten English!

wherefore
For what reason? Why? "Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore are thou, Romeo?"

--Daniel Lyons's Dictionary of the English Language, 1897

Death of Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825),
whose Family Shakespeare (1807), while not the first modern attempt at literary expurgation, loosed a flood of such cleansings during the nineteenth century. Perhaps the original "bowdlerizer" was the Scotsman Alan Ramsay, who in 1724 cleaned up a collection of his own poems. By 1850 seven censored versions of the Bard's plays had been published, and by 1900 nearly fifty were in circulation. Even Lewis Carroll had planned one not long before his death in 1898. In several such editions, large sections of Romeo and Juliet were snipped out, including most of the nurse's lines, leaving what was referred to as an "elegant extract." Victorian do-gooders believed these condensations represented moral progress over their coarser predecessors, including Shakespeare himself. Among other classics to undergo scrutiny and excision were Robinson Crusoe in 1826 and Tom Jones in 1896. Jane Austen avoided censorship by rewording a single reference to "bastards" for the 1813 edtion of her novel Sense and Sensibility.

-The Gneech

Comments

[larksilver.livejournal.com]

Wait.. Wherefore is forgotten?

huh. I used it yesterday. Granted, I was silly-playing with my son whilst looking for his shoes.. but.

Maybe my family is right. Maybe I *am* an old woman in a 30-something body..

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call it "forgotten," so much as "esoteric." ;)

-TG

Wherefore indeed!

[maggievent.livejournal.com]

Wherefore is NOT forgotten! I use it. But then, I, too, am an old woman in a 30-something body. *grins at larksilver*

Anyway, wanted to just mention how much I enjoy these posts. It's a sad day when you can't learn something new and you go a long way to helping each day be happy.

Love SJ. Love the birthday posts (my baby boy's first is March 11th... hint?) and love the fictionlet.

Thanks for being so prolific, so humourous and so nice.

Maggie

Re: Wherefore indeed!

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Well thanks! I aim to please. ^.^

-TG

PS: I should mention that these "Forgotten English" blurbs are written by Jeffrey Kacirk, not me, and come from the "Forgotten English" desk calendar!

Re: Wherefore indeed!

[larksilver.livejournal.com]

Yes.. but we don't *have* that calendar. We have you!

Fear it, yes, the idea of us having you. We'll pin you down and make you do horrible things.. like.. I dunno.. drawing a pooka. Or something.

Re: Wherefore indeed!

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

*stereotypical zoom/pan camera horror effect*

Nooooooooo!!!

-The Gneech

[larksilver.livejournal.com]

Oh - and I just actually read the other bit. I was so stunned by the wherefore I missed the rest.

I didn't know the bit about revisions to Shakespeare. One of the best things about Shakespeare was his tendency to be a bit bawdy. The humor is .. well, it's just good and dirty fun. I'm glad we don't live in a world that revises things just to be PC (cough).

Well, I'm glad that the original plays survived, anyway.