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Comment by bkandel | Hacker News Reader

> Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!

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Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you gradually start making sense of it. The glossary is useful in demonstrating how brilliantly constructed the Nadsat language is, especially the words derived from Russian: horrorshow from khorosho, good; lewdies from lyudi, people; and starry from starei, old.

I disagree with much of Burgess's politics,but his use of language was masterful.

Quite a bit of my favorite sci fi is written like that. If you stop to try and figure out exactly what every sentence means, you are missing the experience and probably won't finish.

Trainspotting was like this for me.

I didn't and don't know Russian and never even thought to try to look up anything like that.

The setting is a fictious future time and place. It's supposed to have words and other things that are different from your normal life.

I just assumed droogs and everything else were just made-up words and got their obvious meanings from context.

It's definitely not a neutral thing that a kid thinks that they way to deal with this is to see if chatgpt can translate it for them.

There will always be those people though so I don't know if it's an alarming facet of a whole population, or just the depressing but mundane fact that that has really always been most people. Still a bad thing, just maybe not a new or abnormal thing.

Or neither. Maybe it's not most people all along but it's certainly some percentage of people all along, and maybe that kid was just one of them that always has and always will exist, and nothing remarkable about it.

I was around fourteen when I read A Clockwork Orange and worked it out fine. I think the author's point stands.

Wow. That went over the heads of both a Harvard student and an Atlantic journalist.

Give me an A... A! Give me an A... A! Welcome to Harvard!

A large point of being literate is that you can pick up context clues to figure out what some word might mean.

And yes that includes slang.

Yeah, this is definitely a massive slight. If it was any other book I'd buy it, but when you read terms like "horrorshow," or "platty", or "droogs" in the first few paragraphs it's not hard to see why one would look up words.

Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?

There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving such a conclusion.

Something like "parallel construction" for law enforcement.

> Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?

Presumably the confused student who sought out a translation.

Could the student really not infer the meanings of those words from context? I don't think Burgess expected his readers to have a working knowledge of Russian.

Granted I don't know the age of the student, but I had a friend that read "A Clockwork Orange" in 8th grade. They shared the book with me and I had an extremely hard time reading it, it wasn't until I started college that I could appreciate + understand the story better. Definitely lucked out in reading an edition that had a glossary in the front.

I can totally see how a modern student today would struggle with reading complicated books.

The whole point of the line is to show that it was not in fact old english. That's why they wrote the line that way.

You were supposed to read that final disclosure part as a punchline which puts the students complaint into it's proper context of being ridiculous.

Instead you took it at face value and agree with the flummoxed student that it is totally unreasonable to be expected to deduce what droog meant from context.

No one ever needed those words to be translated. I promise I am no genius. I am here wasting time with comments like this on HN instead of literally anything better.

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