As I sat here this morning thinking about a topic for today,
I began to wonder just how many words there are stored in my head. I keep using them as if there were an endless
supply. Of course, that made me think
about the contests where people try to guess how many Jellybeans are in the big
glass jar.
The big difference, I guess, is that I can keep reusing the
same words over and over, but once a Jellybean has been eaten… well, that’s
it. It’s over for that particular Jellybean. No one wants to count used Jellybeans. Yuck!
I doubt William Shakespeare ever worried about running out of
words halfway through some grand play.
And his words were much more fancy than ours are today. One of his highfalutin words probably
occupied twice the space as one of ours.
His dictionary had to be several times thicker and so much heavier as
well.
What the history books don’t tell us is just how much time
Mr. Shakespeare spent refilling his ink pen. That had to be a full-time job. I’m not sure when pencils were invented, but
I think he would have liked a good #2.
1795 Nicholas Conte
invented the pencil
1 comment:
Ya know - William Shakespeare was only 52 years old when he died in 1616. Imagine what he could have created had he our life span of today and a pencil!
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