Middle English Sayings

#1. For a moment it seemed that her impeccably impractical education - in which she'd learned about Middle English and Duchamp's urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone - wasn't useless after all.

Ralph Sassone

#2. The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century.

David Wolman

#3. Clutter is stuck energy. The word "clutter" derives from the Middle English word "clotter," which means to coagulate - and that's about as stuck as you can get.

Karen Kingston

#4. My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Samantha Shannon

#5. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.

David Eddings

#6. Oberon Did Middle English hounds bark with an extra syllable on the end? like 'woofe'?

Kevin Hearne

#7. I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#8. Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#9. In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There

Jill Lepore

#10. C'mon. I'll show you."
"Thou speakest strange!" Pearl said.
"So do thou!" I said.
"Thee!"
"Thou!" I said.

Eileen Favorite

#11. His spirit chaunged house and wente ther,
As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher.

Geoffrey Chaucer

#12. With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).

W.C. Sellar

#13. She was in the middle of a city [Nominally a city. It was the size of an English county town, or, translated into American terms, a shopping mall.] at the time.

Terry Pratchett

#14. In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant.

Matthew Arnold

#15. I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp.

Elliot Cowan

#16. In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.

Karen Maitland

#17. Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

Aravind Adiga

#18. The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Tracey Ullman

#19. I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.

Madhur Bhandarkar

#20. The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Salman Rushdie

#21. Nobody wants a house in Osaka,' he said, and it was strange to hear him switch suddenly to foreign pronunciation in the middle of his English. 'It would mean you had to live in Osaka.'

'What's wrong with it?'

'It's like . . . Birmingham.

Natasha Pulley

#22. My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

Lorraine Bracco

#23. We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Raymond Williams

#24. We are from the very middle class family. We have not come from the English medium school. We came from our regional languages school.

Mamata Banerjee

#25. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

John Fowles

#26. Did you know the English wouldn't dream of putting olive oil on food? They use it for ear infections. Freddie told me."
"Yes, I've heard their cuisine hasn't evolved since the Middle Ages.

Glenn Haybittle

#27. I grew up in a middle class English family just outside London. I wasn't surrounded by that speedy city lifestyle, it was a little mellower.

Ed Westwick

#28. Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently.

Aleksandar Hemon

#29. Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.

Matthew Arnold

#30. During the late Victorian period, one English woman in Hampshire who suffered from fits reportedly ate an entire New Testament in an attempt to cure her illness, putting each page in the middle of a sandwich.

Martyn Lyons

#31. I think it's part of being English, particularly if you are middle-class - you're always looking to be reminded that you are no good and you are always actually embarrassed about being successful.

Chris Martin

#32. They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they actually were.

E. M. Forster

#33. By the middle of Henry VIII's reign, the white meats - that is, dairy products - were considered common fare and people from all classes would eat meat whenever they could get it.

Clarissa Dickson Wright

#34. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.

Julian Barnes

#35. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.

India De Beaufort

#36. Until the early middle years of the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It's

Christopher Hitchens

#37. When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.

Colm Toibin

#38. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#39. What has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.

Dale Spender

#40. In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.

Bill Condon