Often you hear, fifth-hand, someone say, "Shakespeare gave us the word puking" or "Milton coined the word dreary." The problem with this is, of course, we cannot be sure that those writers actually invented these words -- they may merely have written the texts containing the earliest surviving record of the words in question. (Or, there may be earlier uses of the words out there, waiting to be discovered; it's just that more lexicographers and philologists are rereading As You Like It than are r...
Often you hear, fifth-hand, someone say, "Shakespeare gave us the word puking" or "Milton coined the word dreary." The problem with this is, of course, we cannot be sure that those writers actually invented these words -- they may merely have written the texts containing the earliest surviving record of the words in question. (Or, there may be earlier uses of the words out there, waiting to be discovered; it's just that more lexicographers and philologists are rereading As You Like It than are r...
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