r u redy 4 txt?
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Nov 192005
Just the other week, while I was in Korea, I faced the interesting task of explaining to Korean native speakers the phenomenon of “texting,” asking whether there was imilar jargon and slang being used in korean Internet-speak. They said that yes, there was, but they were intensely amused by the linguistic distortions inherent in the best SMS and l33t.
And now I see that the classics are getting translated. I dunno, as a former English major I ought to be horrified, but instead, I find charm in these:
Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which describes hunky Mr. Darcy as “fit&loadd” (handsome and wealthy). the ending to Jane Eyre — ‘MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus.’ (Mad wife sets fire to house.) Hamlet’s famous query, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” becomes “2b? Nt2b? ???” John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” begins “devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war.” (“The devil is kicked out of heaven because he is jealous of Jesus and starts a war.”)
In particular, color me unsurprised that Bleak House reduces down to a couple of sentences. That’s Dickens for ya.
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I never consider myself a purist. Life is change, and each new generation attempts to define life against the status quo defined as new by the generation before them.
However, I *do* consider history sacrosanct. Well, as much as it can be anyway.
I wasn’t an English major (Design, with a minor in European and Middle Eastern History), but I’ve always found that “the classics” (or anything written decades and centuries ago) weren’t just stories. They were insights into how a society thought and communicated, a sort of historical and anthropological snapshot of an era otherwise left to the butchering rote teaching does to it.
The SMS treatment of these stories, to me, is a similar butchering. The stories themselves are only PART of what kids should be learning about them. How it’s written is as least as important as WHAT is written. No better example exists than when ya said “Bleak House reduces down to a couple of sentences”. Any story can be summarized into the first two paragraphs of a newspaper article.
If people really want to teach what these stories *mean*, there’s a right way and a wrong way.
As such, I consider them going SMS a gimmick, at best something to potentially attract interest into reading the full version. At worst, they’ll expose that the classics can’t keep up with preferences of modern generations conditioned to seeing them featured by Mel Gibson or Hillary Duff on movie screens.
I was being a little bit facetious. 😉 I agree that the way the originals were written carries important insight into the culture of the times. However, I doubt that this SMSizing will be any worse than the countless generations worth of summarizing that have come before. Surely there were Roman schoolchildren who had two sentence versions of the Aeneid…
Quite so 🙂 Mine is a general rant against revisionist history. I respect summaries that attempt to draw people in, but people who never go the next step repeat the very history they never learned in the first place.
It’s basically a long standing issue I have with folks who just want to know the very little bit they need to in order to have a passing conversation about something over beers.
I’m not really a good generalist. I like to dive into a few things exclusively rather than skim everything. So it’s me against the world of 3-second sound bytes! 😉