I have to admit that I was a poor student of William Shakespeare’s work while I was in secondary school. Over the years, I have come to appreciate the brilliance of his writings, but I was not aware of the many common expressions that we use in English that originated from his plays. The clever short animation below from  Digg demonstrates the extraordinary range of colloquial saying derived directly from the Bard. Among those typically in use are “breaking the ice” (The Taming of the Shrew), “wild goose chase” (Romeo and Juliet), “out of the jaws of death” (Twelfth Night), “naked truth” (Love’s Labor’s Lost), and “knock-knock jokes” (Macbeth), just to name a few.

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