This episode contains a frank discussion of vulgarities, obscenities, profanity, sexual

high-ginks, and blachelants.

So fair warning.

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is episode 129, Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue.

In this episode we're going to look at the vulgar side of Jeffrey Chaucer.

And when I say vulgar, I mean it in both the modern sense of the word and the original

sense of the word.

Vulgar originally meant common or ordinary, and Chaucer was one of the few English writers

of the Middle Ages to paint vivid portraits of the common people of England.

And those portraits included their language, the common language of the common people.

Chaucer's ordinary characters, curse and swear, and they tell stories that many people would

consider to be dirty or obscene.

It's a side of the English language that we don't see very often in the Middle Ages,

and it's partly how the word vulgar evolved from its original sense of common or ordinary

to its more modern sense of dirty, inappropriate or unrefined.

So this time we'll examine how Chaucer used his vulgar tongue to depict the common and

ordinary characters in the Canterbury Tales.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com.

And you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes and transcripts at patreon.com.

slash historyofenglish.

...