John Lydgate (c.1370-c.1451) was an English poet and priest. He wrote ridiculously long poems and quite a few hagiographies. I don't know much about him, although I've read a little of his work. He is credited with advancing the language quite a bit, coining new words (he's ALWAYS in the OED...I dare you to look something up and not see his name) or writing the earliest versions of now-cliched phrases like, "All is not golde that shewyth goldishe hewe." I'm positive that the antecedent of Tag Team's immortal "Party over here!" is somewhere in his book of proverbs, but I'm not going to read the whole thing, so I wrote it for him.
5 comments:
I love this one. I'm going to print it out tomorrow at work and take it up.
I forgot to tell you that I took a picture of my cubicle shrine to LOL Manuscripts! with my phone and sent it to your fsu address.
"So verily I say Whoomp, for there it ofttime is" -- John Lydgate
Did you know that Tag Team has a "Greatest Hits" album? It must be pretty tough to market a greatest hits album from a musical group that only has two albums, one of which was irrelevant.
That album has not one, not two, but three versions of "(Whoomp) There it is." That is exactly the right amount of "Whoomp." Tag Team, I salute you.
But I do think that there is a legitimate linguistic comparison between Lydgate's proliferation of new words and phrases, and the countless neologisms given to us by rap. I bet Tag Team is mentioned in Urban Dictionaries as many times as Lydgate gets name-dropped in the OED.
I have no such picture of you cubicle, Danielle! But I need one.
Also, why was I not consisent with the thorns? Shame on me. And that ink blot on the "party's over here" guy sort of looks like a Hitler stash.
I hope you add a bunch of stuff about the Lollards!
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