#canterbury tales

[fata-vocant]

medieval backstreet boys: you are… my friar

[illustratus]

The Canterbury Pilgrims by Paul Hardy

[lifeofmarvvel]

if you ever feel bad about having too many wips/not finishing your stories, just remember that Chaucer originally planned to have 120 stories as part of the Canterbury Tales, only wrote 22 (and the beginnings of 2 others) and is considered one of the best English authors of his time

[gwydpolls]

Lucian's Library

Feel free to suggest never written books you wish you could read.

[illustration-alcove]

Anna and Elena Balbusso’s illustrations for Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

in answer to @elgooso - #so. prev tags #what. what do you mean#home of rimming?

on this post about Canterbury and my tag: #HOME OF RIMMING

SO.

Calling Canterbury the home of rimming (or "the home of the chocolate smooch") is an in-joke from when we went to visit Canterbury during first year of uni.

BUT WHY, YOU ASK?

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (which, admittedly, happen on the road between London and Canterbury, not in the city itself, but whatever) features The Miller's Tale.

There's a bunch of different things that happen in The Miller's Tale, but for our purposes the key bit is this. Warning - this does, I guess, count as SA, but this is a story told for gross-out reasons by drunken idiot. The point is that its crass and terrible.

Anyway!

Alisoun, who has a husband but is being wooed by two other dudes anyway, is sick of Absolon (guy #2) hanging out under her window, singing to him, and begging her for a kiss. At the climax of the poem, he's outside asking for a kiss, so she sticks her arse out of the window and he kisses her right on the bumhole. With relish.

Here's the key bit of the poem, and a Harvard translation:

Original: And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole and Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers but with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers ful savourly, er he were war of this. Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys, For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd.

Translation into modern English: And at the window out she put her hole, and Absolon, to him it happened no better nor worse, but with his mouth he kissed her naked ass with great relish, before he was aware of this. Back he jumped, and thought it was amiss, for well he knew a woman has no beard.

What really got me was the ful savourly part. And the part where Chaucer specifies that it's her hole, not just her bum or her bumcheek. Because of this delightful tale, we started to call Canterbury the home of rimming. Look, we were young and very, very silly.

Anyway! There we go. Go forth with this knowledge, and kiss people's buttholes ful savourly 🍑

[maniculum]

Google Docs vs. Geoffrey Chaucer

A while back, just for fun, I pitted Google Docs's fancy new (read: hilariously inept) machine-learning spellchecker against a chapter of my dissertation that contained a lot of quotations from Le Morte Darthur:

At the time I suggested I might go back and do the same with the chapters that included substantial quotation from the Canterbury Tales and (shudder) Piers Plowman... and today I find myself with little better to do, so let's give it a go. Below the cut.

Extremely helpful there, thanks. For the curious, gilofre is a plant; in Modern English it's gillyflower. Clowe is just "clove". "Clowe-galofre" is nowhere on Google or in the OED, but it seems "Galofre" is an attested surname, so Google thinks maybe that's what I meant.

Fascinating choices here. That is of course meant to be nutmeg, and Google Docs has seemingly decided that putting in a space to turn one misspelled word into two words, one of which is spelled correctly, is a positive development. That or this is a continuation of the previously-observed trend that Google turns things into brands and corporation as much as possible -- apparently there is a company called "Emuge-Franken", which is the only result for "emuge" on Google Search.

It hasn't gotten anything right so far, by the way -- all those red underlines I haven't screenshotted anything for, it either suggests a word that is wrong but unremarkably so, or fails to suggest anything.

(Never mind, it got a couple right in between the last one and this one.)

This is interesting in that it shows Google Docs interprets things differently based on capitalization. This instance of bityde is capitalized because it's at the beginning of the line; the other one in the phrase bityde what bityde, which isn't capitalized, Google is able to correctly interpret as "betide". However, it seems to think the first is a proper noun and makes different suggestions. (Blyde is the Afrikaans name of the Motlatse River in South Africa, it would seem.)

I am reluctantly forced to hand it to Google Docs with this one. Like, no, that's not what Chaucer meant of course, but I can respect the shot being taken. Also interesting that it gets the blue underline because you can't really spell a transliteration wrong, but that's not how the system we normally use renders it. Not sure why spere "spear" (Google suggests "sphere") and vestiments "vestments" (Google gets this one right) are also marked as blue (style/grammar) rather than red (spelling), though.

... and now I'm taking what I just handed to Google Docs back away. WTF is this? Why...? you know what, we're moving on.

Bafflingly, Google thinks there is nothing at all unusual about that first line. Yep, that's normal Modern English there.

And here's our first example in this post of Google Docs trying to suggest a spelling that is also in Middle English, because I very much suspect the data it uses has been contaminated. Actually, come to think, if their machine learning system bases its judgments on what other users write rather than the old system with a set dictionary, I bet all the people writing papers about pre-standardized-spelling English literature are really screwing up the data. Which is hilarious -- if true, that would mean that I'm actually part of the problem for writing this whole dissertation full of Middle English quotes in Google Docs.

You might think this is another example of the same, but in fact the change from -ioun to -ion makes that suspect, and the Middle English Dictionary doesn't recognize it without the <u>. And if you Google Refleccion, all the results are in Spanish. However, I can't seem to find it in a Spanish-English dictionary, and those same dictionaries tell me the Spanish for reflection is reflexion -- maybe this is a variant spelling? I only have basic high-school Spanish to draw on here, so if any of my followers are fluent and can explain refleccion to me, I would be interested to learn.

Hm... no, that's not right either. Although a quick Google search tells me that there is a YA book called Physik, so that's probably what's screwing up this one. Probably not ideal for that sort of thing to happen.

And this one, it seems, is French. (Again, according to the Middle English Dictionary, all the attested Middle English spellings have the <u> -- but the French cognate is in fact spelled just like Google suggests, as far as I can tell. I don't speak French at all, though, so grain of salt.) I wonder how that happened -- do non-English words just kind of drift into the machine-learning system's vocabulary? Possibly through the same mechanism I speculated about with the Middle English above -- i.e., people write documents that are mostly in English, but contain some quotations or something in other languages, and if that happens enough, Google starts to think it's an English word?

Wait, is that maybe what's screwing a lot of this up? Either Google's system is going "This document is in English, so all the words in it are English words" and thus stuff just keeps bleeding between languages and screwing up the dictionary, OR Google's system is just kind of language-agnostic and sees no issue with suggesting French words in a document that's mostly in English? Is this why there are so many words that aren't correct Modern English spelling, but which Google Docs doesn't mark wrong? Like, they happen to line up with words in other languages, so Google just thinks you're borrowing really haphazardly throughout?

Also, side note, it tried to correct "hir" to "hirt", which is not an English word, but apparently stands for High Impact Resistance Training. Moving on.

Shenden is a Middle English verb that basically means "to damage or destroy". You don't really see it much in Modern English, though the OED has a couple examples of 20th-century usage. Anyway, I thought this was another case of Google bringing in different Middle English words, but a quick search tells me "Sente" is a skincare brand. That's probably more relevant.

Google Docs again just ignoring whole lines.

Odd choice there, sight being closer than site in terms of spelling. Maybe the algorithm assumes that if you end with an <e> you probably mean the second one.

Interesting, Google Docs. Why do you think that should be "night"? (Oddly, it actually gets all the red-underlined words in this line correct, meaning it pretty much has the context of the word.) Somewhat weird suggestion there.

I'm about a quarter of the way through the document and I think this is long enough for now; I'll probably come back and reblog with additions later. Before I go, however, here are my lists of "things spellcheck should be able to fix but can't" from what I've gone through so far.

First, spellings that differ from Modern English by only one letter, but which completely stump Google Docs (i.e., it marks them wrong but only gives the "why am I not seeing a suggestion?" message):

Goute ("gout")

Herbes ("herbs")

Melodye ("melody")

Smale ("small")

Swete ("sweet")

Syde ("side")

Ther ("there")

Wel ("well")

And second, words that are not correct in Modern English but that Google Docs does not mark wrong:

Anoon ("anon")

Attempree ("a temperate")

Beautee ("beauty")

Bowle ("bowl")

Dar nat ("dare not")

Daunce ("dance")

Dede ("dead")

Doon ("do")

Dronke ("drank")

Dronken ("drunken")

Fyr ("fire")

Gyse ("guise")

Hadde ("had")

Hir ("her")

Hir ("their")

Hond ("hand")

Lak ("lack")

Lakked ("lacked")

Lordes ("lords")

Maad ("made")

Pyne ("pain")

Rasour ("razor")

Sayde ("said")

Shere ("shear")

Som ("some)

Sondry ("sundry")

Spyces ("spices")

Styward ("steward")

Syk ("sick")

Thencens ("the incense")

Usshers ("ushers")

Wente ("went")

Wyf ("wife")

Y-goon ("gone")

[morbidwlws]

so i wrote an essay last semester examining themes of monstrous femininity and mankind’s path toward divinity last semester for my brit lit class if anyone would be interested in reading it <3

[tomoleary]

Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) “Canterbury Tales” interior book illustration, 1945

[t4llhum4n]

I don't talk about what I'm reading for school much on here, but like the Wife of Bath's Prologue from the Canterbury Tales?? Pop off queen lmao.

[capt-loverboy]

First 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales, illustrated

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Happy "Canterbury Tales" Season, Ev'rybody!*

The first 18 lines of "The Canterbury Tales," read aloud in Middle English pronunciation, with modern English text translation underneath:

No eye contact. Open captions in English on screen. Under two minutes.

*'Cause I do believe that the Sun is just about halfway through the astrological sign of the ram. And the wee birbs sure are singing a lot in the wee hours of the morning, right now, where I am.

[thedrillerkiller]

Criterion: Trilogy of Life

Will be watching this over the break

[evilasiangenius]

Don't worry about abandoning your wip. Chaucer abandoned his wip for 623 slutty, slutty years and people are still talking about it.

[lafcadiosadventures]

“His tippet was always stuffed with pocket-knives and pins, to give to young and pleasing wives.”

*stops reading* wow they don’t make men like this anymore romance is dead etc

[tenderbittersweet]

2.04.2023 @ 11:43 a.m. -> I’m reading “The Wife of Bath” today. It’s so blessedly quiet in the library. Saturday homework is so less stressful than Sunday homework. My only wish is that I had grabbed a huge cup of coffee. I’ll have to refuel when I take a lunch break. 😌☕️