Reading Chaucer

A textbook in a graduate-level Chaucer course stated that 100 years after Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, no one could read the work. English then was primarily a spoken rather than a written language and had changed so drastically that century-old writings were incomprehensible to all but scholars.

Tonight a character in the USA Network series Mr. Robot said: "This person dropped their wallet, and when I tried to return it to them ..." The character was interrupted then and was prevented from further blasphemy against the English language and from increasing my blood pressure.

Modern writers and actors do not know "person" is one, while "their" and "them" denote more than one. To say "This person dropped their wallet ..." attempts to combine singular with plural. That should be at least a flogging offense.

A literature Ph.D., whose writing class I took in graduate school, one day said there was nothing new in the belief that new methods of talking and writing would destroy English as we know it. Despite the centuries of such predictions, she said, English still exists. I would argue that her life as a lesbian feminist colors her belief.