please empty your brain below

Like Shakespeare, there is dispute as to whether person x actually introduced a particular word to the English language, or were merely the first to record them in a book, as the words were already in common usage in the spoken language.

After all the written word overwhelming records what has already happened in the spoken language, rather than introducing new terms.
Thank you DG for the lovely phrases "as trodden" and "Paradise Lost went viral".
Had to "do" Paradise Lost for my GCE O Level many decades ago.

Might have found it a bit more interesting if we had known about Milton being blind.
I can remember when Sundays were special (not so much since the relaxation of the Sunday trading laws in 1994) but I wonder if there was ever really a time when the majority of British families owned just those three books and no others? When? For much of the time since Milton, books were quiet expensive and most people were very poor. Many would not have been able to read them anyway (although it seems the majority of adult male were considered to be functionally literate since at least the mid-1700s). Even Desert Island Discs give you the Bible and Shakespeare but not Milton...
It's these posts that keep me coming back again and again, this is on the list for the next visit to the UK.

Thank's again DG for such a fantastic blog.
In my first term at Thorpe House School in Gerrards Cross in 1958 my teacher was a Miss Allworth, whose parents lived in Milton's Cottage. Although in those days it was already a museum, part of it was still apparently lived in.
@ray

Not very well taught if you learned so little about the author.
@Andrew: my paternal grandparents, born at the end of the 1890s in Yorkshire, had one book -- an ancient school atlas that showed the Austro-Hungarian empire. They referred to magazines as 'books'. They were literate, and I don't think they were untypical.
My maternal grandparents had a good collection of books, but all through special offers newspaper companies made in the 1930s to get people to subscribe. My grandfather, though ill, used to go off to the library once or twice a week.
Thanks, Alan. I suppose the (rather off topic) point I was trying to make is that in the 1600s and the early 1700s there is a good chance that a family would be illiterate and have no books. By the late 1700s and into the 1800s, at least the head of the household was probably literate, but literacy for women lagged behind. Nonetheless, books were relatively expensive until well into the 19th century. This was the time of libraries and periodicals, when literate people could not afford their own books, and also the time when people would read aloud to others.

Given all of that, was there really a time when a majority of households had only these three books, rather than none, one or two, or lots?

Or perhaps it is rhetorical trope, not to be taken literally?

Sorry, now I'll go off and sit in the corner with all the naughty pedants who insist that a steam locomotive is not a train (see IanVisits today).
Many years ago I read the novel 'Wife to Mr Milton' by Robert Graves. I realise that it was published as fiction, but Milton was described as very critical and intolerant to his much younger wife, the narrator of the book, and there must have been some basis for this
Next time you are in Cambridge, DG, you can visit Milton's alma mater, Christ's College, and see "his" mulberry tree in the Fellows' Garden.
@Alan Burkitt Gray
I think the use of the word "book" (pronounced with a long "oo" like "food") for a magazine is a North Country usage - see some of Victoria Wood's characters.

However, my grandmother, from an old army family, who probably never ventured further north than her Oxford in-laws, also referred to magazines as books.
I wonder where that leaves the 'bookazine' which is what a well-known high street stationer (and possibly others too) call those lengthier publications on better paper that they sell alongside their magazines usually to commemorate a special event or as a special edition of a magazine or just on a popular theme.

(I've always promised to not go off topic in these comments, I'll try and not do it again)










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