Word: chaucerian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least impersonal of cities. Understatement has no place here. Rather, this is a brawny, rough-and-tumble, rollicking place, animated by the earthy good humor of its Chaucerian folk. Hurly-burly impromptu is the way of Seoul. Round-faced women set up huge speakers on busy street corners, then sit beside them, crooning along to organ music as they entertain themselves. Hypervendors stack up rows of imitation Reeboks on the hoods of cars, using the backseats as storerooms for their goods. A man wanders out onto the sidewalk in his pajamas...
...older the friends the dearer. In recent years the Captain has unearthed a deep-seated longing for friends whose existences he used to think of merely as loose satellites to his own. Now he writes to them, phones at regular intervals, actively seeks their company. Old friends are Chaucerian, the Captain declares; the tolerance is wide, the ironies gentle. No gassed-up urgencies, no panic, no competitiveness. You stand with them shoulder to shoulder as on deck, looking out at a time that you at once control and do not control, hearing the footsteps of the young gaining ground while...
Suddenly a strange little creature pops out. He looks like one of the gargoyles with whom the Hunchback used to play at Notre Dame. He even spouts a kind of Chaucerian Middle English, with many of his verbs and adjectives piling up at the end of sentences...