February 21, 2026
Time-travel, but make it grammar
How far back in time can you understand English?
Fans call it an ‘eye test’ while others ask: can we even understand future English
TLDR: A staged blog post ages from modern to medieval English to test where readers lose the thread. The crowd called it an “eye test,” argued text vs audio, shared links, and spun into a debate over whether tomorrow’s English will be even harder to understand—making our language feel thrillingly unstable.
A linguist staged a blog post that time-travels from breezy LiveJournal vibes to medieval mush, and the comments instantly made it a spectacle. The top meme? It’s an “eye test” for English. One reader swore they can track the text until “about when the printing press got popular,” arguing that once books standardized spelling, modern brains stop tripping over the letters. Others fired back that it’s not just spelling—it’s the whole attitude of the language changing, and that’s where people bail.
Then the thread split into teams. Team Ear flexed with audio links—an “audible example” here and a Northern English timeline from Simon Roper here—insisting that hearing it unlocks the text. Team Eyes countered with tales of “flashing between comprehensibility and jumbled letters,” like trying to read Beowulf raw. Meanwhile, a chaos agent asked, “How far into the future is my concern,” and suddenly everyone was predicting English 2126 as emojis, slang soup, or AI glossaries. Jokes flew about getting prescription lenses for Middle English and upgrading our brains to “Gutenberg 2.0.” Hot takes, nerd pride, and a touch of panic—exactly the kind of language drama the internet lives for.
Key Points
- •A fictional blog post illustrates English’s evolution by shifting its language back about a century at each stage.
- •The constructed text transitions from modern prose to period styles (Georgian, Elizabethan, medieval), affecting spelling, grammar, and tone.
- •Despite becoming hard to read for modern audiences, the text remains English throughout.
- •The author created realistic passages based on historical written English, compressing 1,000 years into a single post.
- •The piece appears in Colin Gorrie’s The Dead Language Society, which offers weekly posts, guides, and book clubs on historical texts.