Fun Fact

The ancient Greeks had a mythological explanation for unstoppable talking — the nymph Echo, cursed by Hera to repeat only the last words spoken to her, was the divine embodiment of speech without substance. But the most celebrated garrulous figure in classical literature is arguably Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet — a character so incapable of brevity that even his advice to “be brief” runs on for several lines before he gets to the point. Shakespeare used him partly as a satirical portrait of the verbose courtiers he observed at the Elizabethan court, and Polonius remains so perfectly drawn that drama teachers still use him as the textbook example of a man who mistakes the sound of his own voice for wisdom.