What about syllables? At that time, words were not taught letter by letter, but syllable by syllable. This literary joke boils down to this: in almost everything the tribunes (“cults”) have said, this character finds evidence that they are through and through. Fools. Quail quail, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Qualled; p. pr. & vb. n.

Qualling.] [AS. cwelan to die, perish; similar to cwalu violent death, D. kwaal pain, G. agony qual, OHG. quelan to suffer agony, lith. gelti to wound, freeze pain. See source.] Rampallian is an insult to the veiled past. It first appeared in English in the late 1500s to designate a villain or villain. It seems to come out of nowhere: we don`t have anything that gives us a definitive etymology, although we`ve made some guesses that might go in the right direction. Some etymologists believe it may be a mixture of the previous verb rampe, meaning “to move or act threateningly”, and the now rare Rascallion, which refers to a villain or thug. (This makes sense, since Rascallion is derived from rack).

Apparently, there was enough demand for Banbury cheese for him to make it a 16th century cookbook: what makes Banbury cheese so offensive? It is not what Banbury cheese is, but what it is not, that is abundant. It was also possible to have too little of any of these juices, and we also have English words for this condition. Lily-livered is one of them. Medieval doctors believed that yellow bile was produced in the liver and that the liver of a person whose body produced too little yellow bile would be pale (because it was not full of bile). Since yellow bile is associated with a warlike and aggressive disposition, a person who lacks it would be weak and cowardly. The white of the lily goes well with the supposed pallor of a liver without bile and gives us an invigorating lily. In Shakespeare`s time, fabric was not just a commercial product. It is true that there were weaver guilds that made different types of fabrics for those who could afford to buy it, but fabric was also commonly made at home (and especially by those who could not afford to buy fabric from weaver guilds). Homemade fabric was generally simpler than fabric made for the market – a loom that could weave intricate patterns, for example, was often larger and much more expensive than a simple loom used to make a simple weave.

But it didn`t stop and only started with weaving. The raw materials used for the fabric were also produced in parallel with the weaving of the fabric: those who had money could buy more beautiful yarns of exotic and expensive materials (such as silk) on the market, and those who did not could spin the wool or linen at home. Grammar in Elizabethan England was not about when to use laymen and when to use lies: it was a study of Latin grammar, not English. Therefore, grammars focused on Latin words and constructions, including Latin prefixes and suffixes. Ah, young love, when everything is new and fresh. Except for Romeo`s kisses. To be oppressed; be prostrate; sinking under the court or fearing danger; lose the spirit and strength of resistance; to lose heart; yield; shrink; duck. You Banbury cheese! —The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.1.126 Clothes, they say, make man – or make him unfinished, as the case may be. Fustilaire is a variant of the older (and much more colorful) word fustilugs, and both words refer to a heavy, clumsy person and especially to a fat, sloppy woman. The previous word is fustilugs, which is a mixture of the word fusty, which refers to something dusty, moldy or old-fashioned, and the plural of lug, a word that refers to a tall, clumsy person and is the same pod used to refer to the heavy mother holding a wheel on a car. Fustilarian is the comic interpretation of Shakespeare from Fustilug and is so rare that it is only listed in the Oxford English Historical Dictionary, where Shakespeare seems to have been the only one to have used it.

William Shakespeare Index I cannot say that your cults have worked well when I find the donkey in relation to most of your syllables. – Coriolanus, 2.1.58-60 Many people assume that the alphabet as we know it today is the alphabet as it has always been: A to Z, a total of 26 letters. But this is not the case. The letters were added to the Latin alphabet and omitted before English was English. The thing about Shakespeare`s insults is that the insult is sometimes unclear to modern audiences. We might think that there is a double meaning in sewing your face (does not exist) and completely miss the real insult: the lily. And while you may know what disaster is, you`re probably not familiar with the meaning Shakespeare uses here. You probably know the meaning of “catastrophe”; There was another meaning that referred to a catastrophic end point of something.

Shakespeare built on this “catastrophic end”, which here means where disaster is used to refer to a person`s buttocks. Homespun referred to a type of simple woven fabric woven with thread spun at home, and because plain woven fabric is simple, the word homemade also referred to anything rustic, simple or uncultivated. Syn: squatting; startle; shrink; tremble; tremble; startle; die; Yield. Z, or zed as it is called in British English, is one of these letters. The grandfather of our modern z was the zeta of the Greek alphabet, which is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. The Etruscans adopted and adapted the Greek alphabet, and the Romans in turn adapted the Etruscan alphabet for their own use, but the alphabets were not an individual match. The sound /k/ in Latin, for example, was covered by three Etruscan consonants: kappa (which gave us k), koppa (which eventually gave us q) and gamma (which eventually gave us g). Phonetic changes in Latin also meant that some Etruscan letters were left in the cold because they had no real use.

This is what happened to z: it was removed from the Latin alphabet in the 4th century BC. You Skullion! You Rampallian! Lambasting you! I will tickle your disaster! —Henry IV, Part 2, 2.1.60 Of all Shakespeare`s plays, Henry IV`s two (parts 1 and 2) are the most offensive, which means we`ve saved the best for last. Not only does each piece contain many lines that are supposed to be offensive, but those lines are full of individual insults, like this one. Banbury cheese is a strong yellow cheese made (appropriately) in the town of Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. Banbury cheese was very thin – so much so that when the greedy eaters put away the crust, there wasn`t much cheese to eat. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a secondary character calls Abraham Slender a Banbury cheese mocking his name (and, it is believed, his thinness). Die; perish; therefore to wither; to fade. [Obs.] –Spenser. And this is where Shakespeare`s insult becomes literary: a few grammars of the time focused on the suffix -as, and there were a number of puns in Shakespeare`s plays and in other plays and satires of the time, alluding to the similarity between the suffix -as and the donkey resembling an amem suffix. Collocation in relation was taken directly from grammar books of the time, in which an enterprising student learned the rules that limited when -as could be used in conjunction with another word or as a suffix to a root word. Needless to say, we eventually reintroduced it into the Latin alphabet, but it is one of the rarest letters used, and in Shakespeare`s time, long before the American preference for -ize and -ization was common to -ise and -ization, z was even rarer than it is today.