When I was in elementary school, someone told me that if you twist the stem off your apple, saying a letter of the alphabet with each turn, that it would break off with the initial of the man you were fated to marry. Naturally, this favored the people at the beginning and middle of the alphabet and was a fickle predictor.

So why, now that I’m happily married, did I just catch myself counting through the alphabet as I twisted the stem off my apple?

What weird habits do you have leftover from childhood?

Michael Livingston, in addition to being one of my favorite people, also happens to be a scholar of Middle English. I have just finished listening, twice, to his Chaucer’d excerpt of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.

In a fit of rage against working on my syllabi for the coming term, I took a snippet from John Scalzi’s novel Old Man’s War (chapter 9 for those playing at home) and, well, Chaucer’d it. That is, I took Scalzi’s text and translated it into Chaucer’s dialect. Details follow the audio.

That’s right–audio in Middle English. Tee-hee, quod she. I mean, look at this.

“I can take a shot,” Watson said, sighting over his boulder. “Let me drill one of those things.”

“I kan tak a shote,” quod Watson, lookynge right over his rokke. “Graunte me striken oon.”