A common expression among this troper's friends is "O Irony, verily thou art a cruel mistress! Why dost thou taunt me so?"

Averted in this troper's period works; no matter how well she can research fashion, social mores, and technology, she can't seem to pin down how people spoke without interrupting the flow of the story. So all the characters consistently speak modern English. Troper tries to avoid AnachronismStew the best she can by avoiding all modern slang, putting time-appropriate expressions where she knows she'll get it ''right'', and staying the hell away from excessive swearing. Characters do use "damn", "hell" and maybe a "bastard" here and there, but "fuck" isn't used unless the setting is after the early bits of the twentieth century (WWII being the generally accepted mark.)

Tsk, tsk. They are actually far more likely to say fuck than they are to say any of the "blasphemies." Fuck is not a modern word and sexual and scatological cussing were far more common than religious cursing.

Can cause RealityIsUnrealistic, as a woman at the book store where this contributor works bought ''Beowulf'' in the original Old English, thinking it was just going to have a bunch more ''thees'' and ''thous''.

From this troper's workplace: unthinkingly I asked a coworker, "Whence came these doughnuts?" Her baffled response: "Uhh... Fryeth."

This troper found this used to comedic effect at a local Renaissance Faire, in the form of a shop called "Ye Olde Pottery Dude", which humorously combines faux Old English with modern slang.

In elementary school, this troper brought in a facsimile of a ca. 1700 etiquette book for show and tell -- leading to the following exchangemay be a bit exaggerated, due to the effects of time and accumulated bile.: #QUOTE#'''Teacher:''' Oh, look, it's in ''Old English''!\\ '''This Troper:''' Um, no, no, it's, um... *desperately searches memory* I think this would be Early Modern English.\\ '''Teacher:''' Doesn't look very modern to me. See? It has ''F''s instead of ''S''es!

This troper, under a severe Heroic BSOD caused by a nasty breakup, began talking for months in Shakespearian English. Took his rather snarky and cynical best friend to snap him out of it.

...What.

This troper sometimes writes in this, and often wilst speak like this for laughs.

My friend and I tend to speak like this, leading to: "Thou art a speaker of untruths! Thine trousers shall ignite and hangeth on a telephone wire!"

When this troper went to Sunday School, there was a gent who would act out stories from the bible. In the story of mana (when the Israelites were headed for the promised land), he acted out a guy who gathered more mana than he should have, and said, "Something stinketh I thinketh", then bemoaned the fact that the mana was spoiled. In a story intended to entertain little kids, it worked very well.

This troper's quite proficient in the Polish equivalent of this. Yup, that's the archaic version of the language "built on ForTheEvulz". You shoudl try that sometime, guys. Funny as hell.

Given the number of HistoricalFiction BDs in France, and given how avidly I read them, it comes as no surprise I end up using weird curses in Vieil Oil Massacroit. "Ventre-Saint-Vit!" and "Par le foutre-dieu!" come to mind...

This troper was the only one in his high school who actually could decipher Middle English. Not quite this trope, because it was pronounced, written, and spelled very counter-intuitively, and was near-unintelligible to the less nerdy of his classmates.

This troper and his Junior-year English class in high school had to deal with SirGawainAndTheGreenKnight as well as TheCanterburyTales. He and his mates got the hang of it, though he was never confident of his own ability to decipher it (the modern English translation was always available in-book). Come college when he had to read Canterbury Tales again--but only in the original middle English, albeit with helpful footnotes--he found that though the spelling was somewhat counter-intuitive in comparison to modern English, they often were close enough to modern English to be decipherable (again, with a little help), and the pronunciation, though strange, follows the spelling more closely than modern English; some of his college classmates did have trouble reading it, however. Long story short, YMMV. He did play the trope straight through occasionally mimicking Shakespearean speech in conversation and in poems.

When this troper's Year Seven class was doing a project on Shakespeare, he accidentally did talketh in speeche archaic a couple of times.