Australian academic David McInnis claims literary bias by first editors of OED has credited Shakespeare with inventing phrases in common Elizabethan use.

Shakespeare did not coin phrases such as “it’s Greek to me” and “a wild goose chase”, according to an Australian academic.

In an article for the University of Melbourne, Dr David McInnis, a Shakespeare lecturer at the institution, accuses the Oxford English Dictionary of “bias” over its citation of Shakespeare as the originator of hundreds of words in English. The OED, which saw its original volumes published between 1884 and 1928, includes more than 33,000 Shakespeare quotations, according to McInnis, with around 1,500 of those “the first evidence of a word’s existence in English”, and around 7,500 “the first evidence of a particular usage of meaning”.

“But the OED is biased: especially in the early days, it preferred literary examples, and famous ones at that,” writes McInnis. “The Complete Works of Shakespeare was frequently raided for early examples of word use, even though words or phrases might have been used earlier, by less famous or less literary people.”

His audiences had to understand at least the gist of what he meant, so his words were mostly in circulation already

Shakespeare himself, according to McInnis, didn’t really invent all the words and phrases which are attributed to him. “His audiences had to understand at least the gist of what he meant, so his words were mostly in circulation already or were logical combinations of pre-existing concepts.” More.

See: The Guardian

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