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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   631 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke. It's more scholarly and less popular than expected. The title apparently means that for all the woke signalling being done, actual wokeness is more about appearances and ambition than anything.

I just started Jane Austen’s Emma. I’ve been meaning to read more ”proper” books for a while and I recently watched and loved Clueless (1995) which turns out to be a very well regarded modernized adaptation of Emma to a 90s high school setting. Thus getting an annotated ebook seemed a natural choice (for the high, high, price of $4.50). Wish me luck, lol.

Some googling for translations has also revealed an interesting example of elitism in literary circles. People recoil at the very idea that someone would translate older English language Classics to modern late 1900s / 2000s English and tell you to just suck it up with the overly complicated sentence structure and completely changed meaning of words. However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly - is somehow perfectly fine. Goddamn elitists…

You should be able to read a book from ~1800 without needing a translation. Literally, it’s not that different.

Literally, it’s not that different.

Oh, really?

Do you often use words like "bride-people" or "valetudinarian", describe someone as of "easy fortune" or say "consequence" when you mean "social position"? Those are examples from just the first few pages of the book.

No, but reading books like Emma is precisely the way one becomes familiar with these sorts of archaisms. It'll never get easier if you don't force your way through it. But once you've got a couple 19th century doorstops under your belt, the prose becomes a lot easier to digest.

Also, the different language is half the fun! There's nothing wrong with having to look something up every other page. Consider it an opportunity to learn something new.

Looking up every second word is how I learned foreign languages to begin with. If it weren't for brute-forcing my way through foreign literature via dictionary, I wouldn't be writing to you right now.

I think there is value to knowing the words the author selected. Consequence is a word that shows it's not just "class" and that class is more than just how comfortable your life is. Consequence means that these character's lives are considered more significant through the means they get their bread. The word choice is an introduction and an education into a mindset that is unlike ours.

With about 40-80 hours of practice, you can accustom yourself to the vocabulary and grammar differences. The number of words you will need to look up will go down to maybe a dozen a book. This is very different from requiring everyone read all novels in their original language, because learning a whole language takes 1000s of hours.

Also modern people write like that sometimes. Pick up This is Happiness by Niall Williams for example.

You are Indian right? It's worth noting that the a core part of "English" education in America has been reading the classics, so we do get more practice with the more archaic style. This serves to expand vocabularies, recognize more styles of English communication, and to understand where some words and cultural references come from (I'm looking at you Billy S).

If your primary experience with English is dryer teaching English or technical writing some literature will absolutely be a bit challenging to read, but much of it was more or less lowbrow at the time and it is expected that an "educated" person in the U.S. be able to read these with an excess of assistance.

Separately, many English speaking people will have a fluency with Victorian social norms that will puzzling to people from outside milieus.

Probably your struggle is as much vocabulary as it is missing cultural context.

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