Costard upper-class. While mocking a pedantic schoolmaster, Costard uses the word "honorificabilitudinitatibus", the longest word by far from any of Shakespeare's works. Costard makes many clever puns, and is used as a tool by Shakespeare to explain new words such as "remuneration". He is sometimes considered one of the smartest characters in the play due to his wit and wordplay. Costard's name is an archaic term for apple, or metaphorically a man's head. Shakespeare uses the word in this sense in "Richard III". Costard Costard is a comic figure in the play "Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare. A country bumpkin,
What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.