Ziggy by Tom Wilson & Tom II for April 11, 2020

I can hardly imagine Geoffrey’s work written and spoken in modern English.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote.

Strange. Spell Check complained not at all. I guess their usage database goes back a long way. :-)

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Wow! Still no errors! No, something is wrong. What turned off my Spell Check?

Fringlefratzimus plisk skadershnook! . . . Nope, still not working. But my Settings say to use Google spell-checker. I blame Google.

For my high school humanities class, I had to memorize the beginning of that in Old English. Once I had recited it, I forgot nearly all of it, save one word I couldn’t spell for a million dollars.

The Canterbury Tales? Somehow, I missed that one when I was little.

Well, if the title of the book read "the Canterbury Tails’ then it would have been more apt to mention spell-check

I tried reading that a few years ago. On the 8th word I had to look up in the first sentence, I gave up.

It’s a tough book to get through. Even the modernized version.

Spelling was a new thing in those days.

Just an olde wyves tale

They used the middle english version.