Talk:The Parson's Tale

Sententious

A sermon is a talk on a religious or moral subject given by a member of the clergy as part of a religious service; a long and tedious talk, especially one telling somebody how or how not to behave. In his prologue he says that he wants to tell a story of “virtuous sentence”. When he says sentence he means sententious. Sententious means tending to use, or full of, maxims and aphorism; inclined to moralizes more than is merited or appreciated; expressing much in few words. Sententious has the connotation of being pompous which is how he acts. That is why he tells a sermon. He wants to moralize people and since he is pompous, he talks in a rather haughty tone. uyuigjjh ijskfjkfngiqrhey heyhehy —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.183.148.220 (talk) 17:01, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

'Sententious' only became depreciatory later. At the time of this writing 'sentence' meant meaning or wisdom. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.101.42.203 (talk) 20:07, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Pre-GAN notes

Nice work! Some notes that I imagine would come out in a GA review:

• Might be worth a Background section to give context on concepts from The Canterbury Tales that would not be apparent to a reader navigating to this singular "tale", i.e., what is the work's structure, what is noteworthy about its context within the larger work; what is a host, pilgrim, parson, Harry Bailly, etc.
• The lede should reflect what is sourced within the article, so the background info in the lede can fit into that Background section; i.e., source it there because it's (a) introduced in the lede, not reflecting the article, and (b) without a source
• I don't know the precedence for other articles, but I would recommend translating quotes like "Thou sholdest knytte up wel a greet mateere" similar to how we translate technical language for a general audience
• If the seven sins make up most of the text, should they be summarized here?
• Traditionally the summary/description/contents would be separate from the analysis (of when this type of treatise was popular, character of the parson, Interpretation, etc.) and/or its development (how Chaucer might have come to write it)
• The quotes in the Interpretation can likely be further paraphrased
• The See also links would likely be more useful if annotated
• No love for short footnotes {{sfn}}?

czar 16:28, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

• Hm, good point. That's totally absent from all of the individual Tale articles at present, so I didn't think to add it in, but now that you mention it, it's obviously missing. I'll add something to the "Framing narrative" section.
• I wrote the lead as a summary of the article, so if there's something that looks unsourced, that's a clarity problem, not a sourcing problem - can you point out which bit you mean?
• Hm. I was quite sure I did do this. Hopefully this doesn't mean I accidentally deleted a paragraph somewhere. On it.
• Boy oh boy did I struggle over this bit - and so does everyone else. The truth is that this is really, truly, quite exhaustively boring to anyone who isn't a fifteenth-century English penitent or someone studying fifteenth-century English penitents, so everyone just names the topic, then the scholarly articles tend to jump immediately into the messy details, and the encyclopedic sources spend more time talking about the historiography, what Chaucer's aims might have been, etc. I tried summarizing it in a bit more depth and found that I was basically just describing what the seven sins are, which, well, I can solve that one with a wikilink. If you can articulate some kind of question you had about the seven sins, that might help me come up with something.
• They're all together here mostly as a result of the above.
• I'm too fond of Donaldson's comment to paraphrase it, but I'll see about the rest.
• Good idea.
• I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this format is easier on readers - much more convenient as a reader to be able to see the full citation immediately. As an editor, I much prefer the tidy bibliography you get this way too. I apologize for my poor taste.

...are you sure you don't want to just go ahead and review it? -- asilvering (talk) 03:18, 31 August 2024 (UTC)