(Or was it bathed in such sweet liquor?)
Geoffrey Chaucer–Geoffy to his mum–had a problem. You see, all he wanted to do, just 24-7, was make inappropriate jokes. Jokes about bodily functions mainly, because they were HILARIOUS. His mum was not amused, and often washed his mouth with the ancient precursor of soap. Too bad they were in London (the city proper, even, INSIDE the walls), because it was tough getting something so high tech out in the boondocks. If you were in Leeds or, even worse, Nottingham, you were shit out of luck. So to speak. But in London, you could eat soap, and often did. It took a real literal sort of mind to think that soaping up a mouth would remove the filthy words from it. Those filthy English words. So coarse and unrefined.
How many dinners had it been now that had been needlessly (as far as Geoffy was concerned) cut short due to some, quite frankly, pretty hilarious remark, if he really did say so himself. In fact, Geoffy was so confident and so bold in pronouncing the high quality of his jokes, that he had triggered a kind of suggestible reaction among his friends, such that he only had to get that I’m-about-to-say-something-funny smile on his face, and they’d start busting a gut.
Why’d his mum have to be such a stick in the mud, to use a really popular, one might say hip, new saying. No one was really sure what it meant exactly, but everyone was pretty sure that being a stick stuck in mud would be pretty boring. Also, who wanted to wade into that mud and get the stick, when there were so many others just lying all about? Especially after that time when Arthur Wycklesbee drowned in that muddy sinkhole trying to get, what everyone agreed was, a really sick stick.
So anyway, Geoffy tried to bite his tongue at dinner, or at least keep his mouth full with food, but sometimes it was just too much. Someone would say something, and it would, like, set off a bunch of chain reactions in his brain, which was really pretty prochronistic, but what the heck? Geoffy Chaucer was, he thought, kind of a genius of words. If he was light years ahead of stuff, languagewise, well, who was gonna get on his case about it? His mum? (Well, yes, but not forever!)
Also, what was all this talking French all the time? Geoffy was pretty sure that English would come into its own one of these days. He wasn’t sure why, but all these jokes seemed just a little more funny when he said them in English… Maybe it was just him.