happykatie thinks outloud

"His intellectual influence is simply without parallel. Shakespeare changed our conceptions of race and sex and adolescence in the most profound of ways. There would be no Obama if there were not first Othello, just as there would be no Leonardo di Caprio if there were not first Romeo. He changed the English language beyond recognition, inventing over 1,700 words, words like “jaded” and “bandit,” “advertising” and “skim milk,” “glow” and “gnarled” and “gossip.” The name Jessica comes from The Merchant of Venice. He is, as Virginia Woolf put it, “the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping."