How many inches would Shakespeare budge?
on
Published in Daily Trivia
The phrase "To not budge an inch" is from Will Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, "Induction," Scene 1. This phrase was first uttered by the drunken tinker Christopher Sly. Sly's refusal to budge altered what had been a neutral verb up until then to a negation, according to word researcher Michael Macrone. As he points out in his book, Brush Up on Your Shakespeare, "No one ever says ‘I budged' or ‘let's budge.'"