Daily Inspiration Quote by David Crystal

Three years is doing quiet rhetorical work here: it’s a number that punctures the breezy cultural assumption that Shakespeare is either effortless genius or museum-piece inevitability. David Crystal, an educator and linguist by trade, frames “put Shakespeare’s words together” in a way that demystifies the canon without diminishing it. The verb “put” is almost stubbornly plain, like assembling flat-pack furniture. That’s the point. Shakespeare isn’t just inspiration; he’s labor, evidence, editorial judgment.

The repetition of “words” (studied, sorted) sounds deceptively simple, but it signals a pedagogy: meaning is not extracted by vibe, it’s earned through method. Crystal is also nudging against the romantic myth of the solitary interpreter who “gets” Shakespeare through personal brilliance. Instead, he foregrounds process: reading, categorizing, checking, revising. The subtext is a defense of scholarly work as real work, especially in a culture that treats humanities expertise as decorative.

Context matters: Crystal has spent a career translating linguistic complexity into public clarity, from Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation to teaching audiences how English actually behaves. This line comes off as both a progress report and a gentle rebuke to anyone who thinks textual scholarship is just glorified fan commentary. “Major project” lands with a dry, institutional honesty: not a mystical quest, not a passion rant, but a sustained undertaking that turns reverence into something more useful - knowledge you can verify, teach, and build on.