How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer’s days!

Middleton’s exclamation laments semantic drift: words that were once “honest” (plain, reputable, morally untainted) have, over time, acquired degraded, euphemistic, or corrupted meanings. By invoking Chaucer, he points to the late medieval period as a benchmark for earlier English usage and implies that linguistic change is not neutral but can reflect moral and social decay—especially in a culture where courtly fashion, urban vice, and commercial cant reshape speech. The line also gestures toward a writer’s frustration: dramatists and satirists depend on stable meanings, yet language continually mutates, forcing authors to negotiate between inherited diction and contemporary slang.