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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1034 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

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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.

You are a Finn 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.

EDIT: An earlier version of this comment had misremembered OP's country of origin. Apologies for all involved and for my dead dignity.

Jane Austen was not a victorian writer, and he's Finnish anyways.

I don't know that she's a popular part of the American curriculum, either- Shakespeare makes a strong showing in the better programs, and everyone reads Huck Finn(The American novel). The shorter works(Where the Red Fern Grows, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird...) are pretty common. Younger grades have modern literature written almost specifically to be read in English class. In high school, I remember a bit of Steinbeck, more Dickens than I would have preferred, but perhaps a quarter of the curriculum being Shakespeare.

Context

Yeah def mixed him up with someone else.

Doesn't need to be literally Victorian or Regency for random English bullshit and Amero-English bullshit to be an appropriate description of context that is skipped off of.

And agree with the characterization of Austen being less popular than Shakespeare etc, but it remains pretty popular with women and girls who read which means the influence is there.

And the point remains: it's not pure highfalutin, and educated people will communicate in that way at times and American students are supposed to be presented the opportunity to develop understanding of those references. It's much harder for non-English speakers to get the exposure (especially in the formative years) to make this stuff easily understandable.

You are Indian right?

Accusing a Finn of being Indian...

Dang must have had 'em mixed up with someone else - point remains about it being a first language vs. not a first language expectations thing.

Always going to be harder coming in.

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