shredsandpatches:

blazeofgold:

i know this isn’t really original but im obsessed with how english words that refer to the bodily, the tangible, the elemental etc are so often of anglo-saxon/germanic origin e.g. (heart, blood, jaw, flesh) or observable phenomena, like adjectives describing light (glisten, gloaming, glitter, gleam, gloom, glow, dark, fire) or places (hearth, hall, hill), and the most stark, primal emotions or states (hate, love, life, lust, death) and of course fuck, shit, bitch, cunt etc– these often monosyllabic, consonant heavy words…and then you have the lilting, limpid romance/latinate, words like acquiesce and exacerbate and agrarian and pellucid and clemency and lucidity…and how maybe the secret of all great english language poetry is a textural balancing of the push-pull of the germanic and the romantic/latinate, a balancing of these two energies. like some of the most powerful moments in shakespeare are where the verbosity falls away and you have these plain utterances (“to be or not to be” or lear’s dying “look there look there”– all anglo saxon words) that are so powerful precisely because the language is so ornate elsewhere. i once came up with an elaborate wildly incoherent theory about this in the pub with some drunk american masters student who was dressed like harry styles

One of the great examples of this sort of thing in Shakespeare does almost the opposite: namely, Macbeth’s “no, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” — where we have an explosion of multisyllabic (five and four syllables respectively) Latinate words surrounded by largely monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon-derived words, like it’s the filling in a macaronic word sandwich. And it just hits so hard when the big words come out.

(also, my high school teacher told our class when we were doing King Lear to always watch the monosyllables in Shakespeare and it’s never steered me wrong)