How to ruin novels, plunge our society into further stupidity, and generally make me angry.
November 17th, 2005 | Published in Books & Reading, Culture
If you don’t want to know how Bleak House ends, look away now
Some of the most complicated and wordy works of English literature are being compressed into the jerky speedwriting of text messages, to help students choose classics and master their revision.
The dark labyrinth of plots in Bleak House and the epic verse of Paradise Lost are among masterpieces picked for drastic slimming into a couple of lines for sending automatically to mobile phones.
The scheme uses the crafty shorthand of texting to turn the most famous line in Hamlet into 2b?Ntb?=? Key passages to quote in exams or seminars are also picked out, such as F Scott Fitzgerald’s warning to the Great Gatsby about his gilded youth:
“MembaDatAlDaPplnDaWrldHvntHdDaVantgsUvAd”.