"Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?""His real gift was as a phrasemaker. 'Shakespeare's language,' says Stanley Wells, 'has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.' Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion... roughly one tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception - a clearly remarkable proportion."
Bill Bryson, Shakespeare, London: HarperPress, 2007 (113-4).
