What Does Shakespeare NOT Say? Surf: "Hold acquaintance with the waves"

Shakespeare wrote a lot of words about a lot of topics, including words themselves. Hamlet bemoans the meaninglessness of words, “Words, words, words,” in a conversation with Polonius. He illustrates the comic potential of the misuse of words with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, when the uneducated Dogberry incredulously asks, “Dost thou not suspect my place?” (meaning “respect).

In his plays, Shakespeare used 31,534 different words. By comparison, the average English speaker knows and uses between 10,000 and 20,000 words. (We should thank our elementary school teachers for all of those vocabulary tests!)

You should be able to imagine, then, my challenge in finding a word that Shakespeare did NOT use, as a departure from my series “What Does Shakespeare Say (WDSS).” My one rule was that the word had to be in existence when Shakespeare was alive and writing, which disqualified words such as “internet” or “automobile.”

I wracked my brains for months until finally, Hurricane Irma provided me with The Word: surf. Friends posted pictures on Facebook and media also posted pictures of (fool)hardy souls in the surf off Folly Beach as Hurricane Irma approached. In fairness to the Bard, the word in its modern form did not appear until 1680. However, its forerunner, “suffe,” appeared in the 1590’s, while Shakespeare was at the height of his dramatic powers. At least two of his plays involve ocean storms, providing the opportunity to write about “suffe” or “surf.”

Scholars date Twelfth Night, with its shipwreck in Act 1, scene 2, to the early 1600’s. At this point, the sea captain, trying to give hope to Olivia that her brother Sebastian has not drowned, claims to have seen him clinging to the boat after the shipwreck, “I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves.” I can testify after months of watching surfers off of Folly Beach that they do, indeed, “hold acquaintance with the waves,” so Shakespeare defined the word “surf” in this play without actually using it.

In addition, the impetus for Shakespeare’s final work, The Tempest, dated to 1610, rests on a storm, possibly of hurricane strength. “Who cares these roarers for the name of the king?” Boatswain asks when ordering the noblemen below deck during the storm. Someone at some point could have surfed in The Tempest.

To further support my claim, I dug into the history of surfing, finding timelines in Surfer Today and a timeline presented by the Surfing Heritage Foundation, which show surfing going back as far as 3000 BCE. (As a side note, the trivia I found most fascinating is that of Mark Twain surfing off Hawaii in 1866. I can imagine him in his bathing costume puffing on a cigar as he shoots towards shore. He published Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing it in the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii in the 1860’s and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii as a result.)

Even though it took the natural disaster of Hurricane Irma to point the way, I am pleased finally to find a word that Shakespeare did NOT use, even though he could have!

LAGNIAPPE: Depending on your view of English class, it may be to your delight or chagrin to realize how many words and phrases common to modern English that we can blame or laud Shakespeare for inventing. Scholars credit Shakespeare with inventing 1700 words through methods such as functional shift, that is changing a noun to a verb, as in “eye,” the organ of vision, and “eye,” as in to scrutinize something, or just plain old making up words. (Here is another link to phrases Shakespeare created.)