The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter, aka Twitterature, hit our doormat earlier this week.
A clever, yet bizarre little tome in which some of the most revered pieces of literature are cut up into 140-character chunks and spewed out at speed.
Thus, if you’ve never read, say Dante’s Inferno, you ‘may’ be able to work out what the plot is through tweets like this…
‘I’m being attacked by three theoretical beasts! I don’t think I’m in Italy any more!’
Other greats retold include Beowulf, Romeo & Juliet, Crime and Punishment and Metamorphosis
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Really enjoyed the Reader’s Editor column in Monday’s Guardian about accents on foreign words.
As a linguist, writer and sub, this ticks so many boxes – the difficulty, but the importance of making sure that the correct accents are placed on foreign words.
The shout that often comes up, when writers, subs etc miss the odd grave, tilde or umlaut, is, ‘oh, it doesn’t really matter’.
But clearly it does. Missing accents is just plain ignorance. You may roll your eyes at the grave accent in Arsène Wenger, but if you were called Paul Smith and someone spelled your name Paul Smoth, you’d be mightily peeved, wouldn’t you?
Sweeping generalisation, obviously, but it all goes back to the English notion that everyone should speak their language, rather than learn a new one.
If only tilde, umlaut, cedilla and diaresis were everyday words, we’d all be a little bit better informed!
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The Olympics reminded me of some long-forgotten nugget of totally useless trivia that I learned while studying for my A Level in Contemporary History.
My teacher for World History 1945- the present day was Robert Swann – a bearded chap who was obscenely intelligent. His knowledge was quite remarkable and he’d wander into the lesson without any notes and just talk to us about a subject for 45 minutes and expect us to make the relevant notes.
A bit like a University lecture, except that even at university many lecturers give you print-outs of the most salient points at the end.
Anyway, I digress. One of the things I remember being taught was how the modern Chinese Mandarin came to be written in Western (roman) script.
For most of the 20th century, Chinese words and names, such as Mao were transliterated using something called Wade-Giles. Thus for years, everyone knew the capital of China as Peking.
Then in around 1979/1980, it was decided – I know not by whom – to revert to something called Pinyin, the system developed within China to romanize the Chinese characters.
So now we know the capital as Beijing, although I’m not sure if we call the dish Beijing Duck any more.
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