Yvonne from Rock Hill, South Carolina, learned the phrase honor bright as a way of assuring that one was telling the truth, much like cross my heart or I swear to God. It’s common in the UK, and Shakespeare used honour bright in Troilus and...
Kaitlyn from Rye, New York, is puzzled by people referring to their youth as their salad days. It’s drawn from a metaphor employed at the end of Act One of Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare. Cleopatra recalls a past dalliance with...
The phrase Lead on, Macduff, meaning “Let’s go!” or “You go on ahead and I’ll follow,” is an alteration of the famous phrase from the final scene of combat in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Bookshop|Amazon), where...
Stephen in Wilmington, North Carolina, called about hankering and unbolted cornmeal. A hankering is a strong desire for something, and the word goes back to at least the early 1600s. It’s related to hang, as in hanging around hoping for something...
William Shakespeare’s early schooling was less an English class than a Latin training ground for rhetoric, imitation, and argument. In How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok explains that Stratford grammar...
In a passage from How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College, offers an apt description of class letting out and students wandering about while focused on their phones. This is...