Talk:checklaton

RFV discussion: February 2022–June 2023
Middle English. Fay Freak (who should have RFVed it if he thought it was not attested in Modern English) changed the Modern English entry (which I have recreated with quotations) to Middle English on 22 May 2021. J3133 (talk) 03:55, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
 * But I did not think it was not attested in Modern English. Checkmate. If you want to make out which spellings are Middle and Modern English you may do so, note however that the Modern English occurrences, if they aren’t macaronic switching between Middle and Modern English, are borrowed from Middle English literature—or from dictionaries: Spenser borrowed it from Middle English, normalized or mistranscribed it perhaps, and this ghost word was borrowed by the help of reference works. Here in the the Spenser Encyclopedia. “Gathered directly from a reading of Chaucer”—in his manuscript of Chaucer so spelt? There is a whole article about the word “checklaton” in a volume of the Spenser studies not put online yet. In any case I was very right about when the word was living in English, it was extinct by 1500. Fay Freak (talk) 04:24, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
 * By “attested” I mean “meets our attestation criteria”, i.e., three quotations. If this spelling does not have (at least one) quotation in Middle English then it should be removed. J3133 (talk) 04:41, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
 * I know what you mean, but you are still misrepresenting the term’s having been used; I was making a subtle point about having only a Middle English header and including the Spenser quote thereunder; if so combined it was of course “Spenser’s spelling of a Middle English word”. The question is left how Spenser got this spelling if the word was extinct. It might have been correcter to write, followed by something about how this word has been obtained in New English works. Fay Freak (talk) 04:55, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

RFV-failed. No trace of any spelling resembling this at MED or EEBO. Presumably it was just Spenser's idiosyncratic spelling of the word; he also spelled it in another work. (That one can also come to RFV.) This, that and the other (talk) 03:49, 25 June 2023 (UTC)