Today, while reading Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967), I found myself especially enjoying the humor of words and phrases Stoppard uses that might have been coined since William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", the source of Stoppard's play, was written around 1600. Stoppard's Guildenstern, for example, uses two potentially anachronistic phrases in a row: "You turn up out of the blue with some cock and bull story." But while the earliest appearance of "out of the blue" in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1879, the earliest appearance of "cock and bull story", according to linguist Gary Martin, is from "Law-Trickes", a 1608 play by Shakespeare's contemporary John Day (1574–1638?). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 September 2025)