Happy 445, Will!

If Shakespeare were alive today he'd be turning 445 and probably not at all happy about it. But he'd probably be the perfect person to serve as culture cop on Chicago's official "Talk Like Shakespeare Day," at the behest of the Chicago Shakespeare Society, proprietors of this cool new website.

I am as willing to say "Zounds" and "Forsooth" as the next guy, but yielding to my impulse to go all boring and nerdy over anything, may I suggest that Shakespeare (at his best, at any rate) is really not all that abstruse. Well, actually, I guess he could be abstruse (although I'm not sure that he eveer used the word)--but it was a bug, not a design feature. He even turns it to advantage: the impulse to over-the-top linguistic exuberance among young lovers in Romeo & Juliet is a sly reminder that they know more about language than about life. Meanwhile, how much trouble do you have with

To be or not to be...

or

What a piece of work is a man!

or (if you prefer a woman's voice)

Give me my robe. Put on my crown.

That's 22 words, 22 syllables. For something a tad more complex, try

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground /And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

That's 18 words, 20 syllables, Winston Churchill quoted it; no friend of obscurity he. And there is always

Never, never, never, never never!

Sometimes parodied as "Never, never, never, never, never, NEVER!" But that would be overdoing things.