<p>LONDON (Reuters) - Woe un2mnkind! The text message is trying to summarise the great poet John Milton and a respected academic thinks this may be a smart new way to teach literature.</p>
<p>A company offering mobile phones to students has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries and quotes from literary classics.</p>
<p>The hope is that messages in the truncated shorthand of mobile phones will help make great literature more accessible.</p>
<p>“We are confident that our version of ‘text’ books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,” the company, Dot Mobile, said in a press release.</p>
<p>Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is rendered: “2B? NT2B?=???”. At the end of Romeo and Juliet, “bothLuvrs kill Emselves,” while Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice concludes when “Evry1GtsMaryd.”</p>
<p>“Woe un2mnkind,” is part of its summary of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton actually wrote “Woe to the inhabitants on Earth.”</p>
<p>“Dot mobile’s unique service amply demonstrates text’s ability to fillet out the important elements in a plot. Take for example the ending to Jane Eyre – ‘MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus’. Was ever a climax better compressed?” said Sutherland, this year’s chairman of the judges for the Man Booker literature prize.</p>
<p>That’s “mad wife sets fire to house” in English – the climactic event in Charlotte Bronte’s Romantic classic. </p>
<p>I do not read classics, unless prompted by an English Literature teacher, but I’m disgusted a Professor (much less one from UCL!) would agree to such a thing. </p>
<p>It…it just does not make sense. They think it would make the great classics more “accessible” if it’s in mobile shorthand? Bollocks, I say! What would be the point of offering quotes, anyway? Would people use them as “signatures” as they do for emails? I highly doubt that. Furthermore, if someone wanted to quote a great classic, they could do that of their own time and style.</p>
<p>And…“text message summaries”?? How would this work? You message the company, stating you need help catching up on an unred classic for class and you get a compressed (and somewhat uneligible - for shorthand) summary!?! </p>
<p>Students could run to SparkNotes if they haven’t read the book! Would they be willing to give up valuable inbox space in their mobiles for something they could find out online??</p>
<p>Well, a lot of students complain that they can’t understand the vocabulary in the books, especially in Shakespeare. This translates the stories into a dialect with which they are more familiar.</p>
<p>That would cheapen the experience of reading Shakespeare, though… I had a hard time deciphering Hamlet but the books we used had footnotes with little translations/explanations. Being able to appreciate, or at least, understand the English style in another period, broadens knowledge of literature.</p>
<p><em>sheepish smile</em> And I also would appreciate my mobile being kept to personal things, too. :D</p>
<p>GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (1863)
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.</p>
<hr>
<p>Many of the parents on this board were required to memorize the beginning of this speech and it’s one of the best known Presidential speeches.</p>
<p>By the reference to one of Arnie’s films, I meant that his class had to speak about the presidents and that was one of the speeches they started. (Rather cute little kids.)</p>
<p>Naturalized citizen means staying in a country long enough to obtain citizenship, right? </p>
<p>I can’t imagine feeling that bond to any country. Heck, the idea or image of staying in one country for the rest of my life after undergrad/grad school is inconceivable!</p>
<p>Overseas is right. Read the speech (and forget Arnold). Think instead of those who died in wars and those who have survived war. There are plenty of them in your part of the world.</p>
<p>It is pretty powerful. I haven’t talked to my aunties or uncles or grandparents who were alive during the Japanese occupation of my home country during WWII. They don’t talk about it.</p>
<p>Common humanity…</p>
<p>Right now, I’m so angry and hurt, I don’t see a common humanity. I see people split up because of religion, culture, nationality. Generation. Age. It’s…argh.</p>
<p>There are times when I feel buoyed by a feel of love for everybody. That though humans are ruining our home, we still are an alright (right or wrong way of spelling?) species. Other times, I feel so disgusted, I feel myself withdrawing into my apathy.</p>
<p>Wars…horrible…but sometimes imperative. <em>sigh</em> :(</p>
<p>There’s a rather simple solution to the problem of comprehending ‘old’ English: reading. It worked quite well for me. Not to sound like an eighteen-year-old elitist, but this text-message massacre of literary English is horrifying.</p>
<p>BTW, Arnold misquoted the Gettysburg Address in Kindergarten Cop. (He said “forefathers” instead of “fathers.”) So pathetic that editors didn’t catch that. . .</p>