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
- chivalry
- audiences
- record
- notions
- narrators
- romance
- 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
- audiences
- chaucer
- chivalry
- comedies
- cook
- courtly
- destiny
- deviance
- dialects
- entertained
- filled
- generally
- genres
- humor
- instance
- language
- literary
- lofty
- love
- medieval
- narrators
- notions
- parson
- prose
- quirks
- record
- ribald
- riffs
- romance
- satirize
- scatological
- sexual
- slapstick
- solemn
- squire
- tale
- tales
- tropes
- varied
- vivid
- ways
- work
- worldviews