To simp or not to simp? Shakespeare would have loved the question

What’s “simp?” I asked my menchildren. They lolled. Mother, bless her, knows nothing; she still says “lol”.

“Simp”, it transpires, is both a verb and a noun, with “simping” being the largely-male online practice of bigging someone up and complimenting them excessively when you don’t have any reciprocal relationship with them.

For instance “you look so beautiful today, Rihanna/Beyonce/Hot Influencer – I love when you wear
dresses like that”. It’s a vaguely creepy, stalky behaviour, masked as niceness.

One day the definition might make it into the dictionary. For now though it’s internet only, but everyone knows what it means – except mothers and other old people. And some old people click their tongues and say “you can’t just go making up random words” because the dictionary is full of real words, and “simp” is not one of them.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the evolution of language, and what gets included in the dictionary. One of the problems with early dictionaries and their subsequent development is that for a word to be added it had to have been written down, to have been published. To this day, for insertion, a word needs to have several citations.

Which got me thinking about William Shakespeare.

Young Will, back in the day, used some 20 000 different words in his plays and sonnets. Of these, 1 600 are the first known usage or, as is often said, he invented them.

Now Will’s brilliance is not in doubt, but no, he didn’t invent the word “elbow” – he did, however, use it for the first recorded time as a verb. He also altered and reappropriated words by adding suffixes and prefixes and, yes, occasionally making them up from scratch.

But Will’s true genius was surely in hearing how people speak – all people: uneducated people, common people, people on the streets, people who would never get Elizabeth’s ear – and transferring them to the stage. Will heard the world. Typically, the people who wrote stuff down were educated people, wealthy people; they were men. The words of the working classes, of the poor, of women who were usually illiterate – like Anne Hathaway – were left out by snobbery or by default.

Will listened – and surely saved many of them. William Shakespeare would have loved “simp.”