Comment by noir_lord

I knew all three but I had some advantages - English is my first language, I'm British and mire (Quagmire is still used to describe a bad situation that's hard to escape from as well as it's original meaning - so not a huge leap to what mire is) and blinkers (idiomatically - "he had his blinkers on" is still used for example) are still in use (I wouldn't say common use but not extinct either) and Michaelmas comes from liking history and looking up the term at some point in the last 30 odd years.