pre-chaucerian

Updated: May 3, 2025

I had supposed that the words cuckold and moon-calf had none but literary usage in America, but we often hear them in the mountains, cuckold being employed both as verb and as noun, and moon-calf in its baldly literal sense that would make Prospero's taunt to Caliban a superlative insult. Our highlander often speaks in Elizabethan or Chaucerian or even pre-Chaucerian terms.

Horace Kephart - Our Southern Highlanders