full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Iseult Gillespie: Everything you need to know to read "The Canterbury Tales"

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Chaucer uses the quirks of the characters’ language – the ribald humor of the Cook, the solemn prose of the Parson, and the lofty notnios of the Squire – to satirize their worldviews. The varied dialects, genres, and literary tropes also make the work a vivid rcored of the different ways Medieval aeenciuds entertained themselves. For instance, the Knight’s tale of courtly love, carlhivy, and destiny riffs on rmnocae, while the tales of working-class nrraartos are generally comedies filled with scatological language, sxeaul deviance, and slapstick.

Open Cloze

Chaucer uses the quirks of the characters’ language – the ribald humor of the Cook, the solemn prose of the Parson, and the lofty _______ of the Squire – to satirize their worldviews. The varied dialects, genres, and literary tropes also make the work a vivid ______ of the different ways Medieval _________ entertained themselves. For instance, the Knight’s tale of courtly love, ________, and destiny riffs on _______, while the tales of working-class _________ are generally comedies filled with scatological language, ______ deviance, and slapstick.

Solution

  1. chivalry
  2. audiences
  3. record
  4. notions
  5. narrators
  6. romance
  7. sexual

Original Text

Chaucer uses the quirks of the characters’ language – the ribald humor of the Cook, the solemn prose of the Parson, and the lofty notions of the Squire – to satirize their worldviews. The varied dialects, genres, and literary tropes also make the work a vivid record of the different ways Medieval audiences entertained themselves. For instance, the Knight’s tale of courtly love, chivalry, and destiny riffs on romance, while the tales of working-class narrators are generally comedies filled with scatological language, sexual deviance, and slapstick.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
middle english 2

Important Words

  1. audiences
  2. chaucer
  3. chivalry
  4. comedies
  5. cook
  6. courtly
  7. destiny
  8. deviance
  9. dialects
  10. entertained
  11. filled
  12. generally
  13. genres
  14. humor
  15. instance
  16. language
  17. literary
  18. lofty
  19. love
  20. medieval
  21. narrators
  22. notions
  23. parson
  24. prose
  25. quirks
  26. record
  27. ribald
  28. riffs
  29. romance
  30. satirize
  31. scatological
  32. sexual
  33. slapstick
  34. solemn
  35. squire
  36. tale
  37. tales
  38. tropes
  39. varied
  40. vivid
  41. ways
  42. work
  43. worldviews