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I believe Shakespeare was considered wordy and difficult by his "broad" audience. But he knew how to hit the crowd's buttons and was considered populist by the

I believe Shakespeare was considered wordy and difficult by his "broad" audience. But he knew how to hit the crowd's buttons and was considered populist by the literary elite of his day. And the myth of his large vocabulary continues. Looking through the list of unique words used by Joyce, surprisingly few of them looked invented to me.

barrkel 15y ago
Joyce loved making up words by joining them together. It almost seemed like he was making a kind of bid for immortality by throwing as much stuff at the wall and seeing what would stick. It's one of the most obvious characteristics of his writing; that you doubt this makes me wonder if you've read his work. I did a download of Ulysses from Gutenberg, did an egrep -oi '[a-z]+' | sort -fu > u, then aspell dump master > d, then sort -f d d u | uniq -ui; that gives over 7000 seemingly unique words of the of the 29000 used in that book, but many of them are misspellings, transcription errors, proper nouns, Greek references, etc. Here are a small handful selected at random; they are very probably not the best examples, as there are far too many to examine to discern that: crookeding flusterfied holyeyed languideyed unportalling dullbrained darkshawled dedale overarsing heartbalm seacold beardframed doaty birdsnies Many of those 7000+ words that aren't in aspell's dictionary on my machine because they're archaic, legalese, obscure dialect, foreign allusions etc., but you can hardly read a paragraph without some word made up.
- zwischenzug 15y ago
  Shakespeare's full of mis- and variant spellings too. He's also held up as an example of someone that made up words. My point about Joyce was that, if you want to hold up someone as a writer who has a large vocabulary by the standards that have traditionally been applied (as he has been), then he simply doesn't.

barrkel 15y ago

Joyce loved making up words by joining them together. It almost seemed like he was making a kind of bid for immortality by throwing as much stuff at the wall and seeing what would stick. It's one of the most obvious characteristics of his writing; that you doubt this makes me wonder if you've read his work. I did a download of Ulysses from Gutenberg, did an egrep -oi '[a-z]+' | sort -fu > u, then aspell dump master > d, then sort -f d d u | uniq -ui; that gives over 7000 seemingly unique words of the of the 29000 used in that book, but many of them are misspellings, transcription errors, proper nouns, Greek references, etc. Here are a small handful selected at random; they are very probably not the best examples, as there are far too many to examine to discern that: crookeding flusterfied holyeyed languideyed unportalling dullbrained darkshawled dedale overarsing heartbalm seacold beardframed doaty birdsnies Many of those 7000+ words that aren't in aspell's dictionary on my machine because they're archaic, legalese, obscure dialect, foreign allusions etc., but you can hardly read a paragraph without some word made up.

zwischenzug 15y ago
Shakespeare's full of mis- and variant spellings too. He's also held up as an example of someone that made up words. My point about Joyce was that, if you want to hold up someone as a writer who has a large vocabulary by the standards that have traditionally been applied (as he has been), then he simply doesn't.