Register and Propriety

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Chaucer’s Host knew how to parrot the technical terms of medicine, how to utter the words urynals, jurdones, galiones, cardynacle, or triacle. He even seems to have known something of the meaning of some of them, yet he cannot use them competently. Indeed, he implicitly admits that his use of them may not make much sense, and offers as an explanation that ‘I kan nat speke in terme’. What exactly does he mean by this phrase?¹ Chaucer does not use it elsewhere in precisely this form, but his use of the word termes in general suggests that he understood it to refer to words which were in some way distinct from the ordinary range of vocabulary used in everyday conversation. Termes may owe their distinctiveness to their obvious foreign origin, as with the phrases par consequens (D 2192) in the Summoner’s Tale, or questio quid iuris in his General Prologue description, which, we are told, the Summoner chattered as uncomprehendingly as a jay.² Such Latin termes were also used by the Pardoner to quicken piety in his congregation, who were much impressed, if not informed, by this practice. The Summoner had learned his Latin tag, along with a few others whose meanings were unknown to him, from the formulaic phrasing of a decree; and it is characteristic of those phrases which Chaucer specifies as termes that he often makes reference to their source or proper field of use.