Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for June 21, 2019

and later on, Shakespeare’s insult caught onto Marty McFly (who really wants to try out the carrot/onion mixture on their windshield these days?)

To be or not to be afraid. That is the question. Cluck cluck cluck!

I think The Weather channel had a thing about using onion on frozen windshield. Yep! They did.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/video/fight-winter-using-potatoes-onions-and-other-common-household-items-873431619880

Shakespeare introduced many words for the first time; eyeball, for instance. Here are 20 such words. https://mentalfloss.com/article/48657/20-words-we-owe-william-shakespeare

I can remember some old timers take a tobacco pouch with tobacco in it,soak it in water then rub it on the windshield worked pretty good for a short time.

I did a quick search of “shakespeare chicken coward” which brought up an article from the Independent which claims William Kemp beat out the other William for this honor:

The first example we have of chicken meaning a coward comes in 1600: William Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder: “It did him good to have ill words of a hoddy doddy! a hebber de hoy!, a chicken! a squib.”

Rain’s not all they’ll repel.

Shakespeare gets credit for inventing a lot of words or expressions. But, we don’t know that he actually invented them. Shakespeare’s use is the oldest known use of those words. But, he might have heard some of them from others, and decided to use them in his writing.

I assume old skateboards were first used for skurfing (skate+surf=skurf)?

There appears to be some credible literary research now that throws serious doubt as to Shakespeare being the actual author of his works. He may have just been a ghostwriter for another author.

Well I’ll be.

I thought “Needles” invented the term chicken…

And the response to his insult was how we got the modern meaning to “Duck!”…

It wasn’t Shakespeare it was Bacon who coined the phrase chicken.

And who was the first one to refer to a coward as a coward?

Most sayings attributed to some very famous person were in fact coined by a less famous person.

BTW, the fact that some literate person was the first one to write a word down doesn’t mean that this word was invented by them. Most people couldn’t read and write in olden times anyway.