Comment by christina97
9 months ago
This is the most ridiculous thing. The leap from deciphering ornate language from an old novel to “literacy” let alone being about to read is silly.
You can always set people up to fail. It’s like you gave some junior frontend engineers some highly optimized fortran from 45 years ago and asked them to explain it to you. Without much of a motivator you would probably conclude “software engineers can’t read code”.
Other than "Michaelmas term", "mire" and "blinkers", the broad meaning of it isn't that hard to understand. The language is fairly modern. That said, I suppose that if some grinning asshole were to have me read it in front of him and then yell at me "Quick! What did that passage mean?", I might stumble.
I like that Dickens mentioned the Megalosaurus.
The problem isn't so much the words themselves, but the structure. No one really writes these kind of lengthy comma-peppered sentences like this today:
As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
A more modern way to write that would be something like:
Mud overflowed the streets, as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the earth. Would it not be wonderful to meet a Triceratops, forty feet long or so, waddling like a giant lizard up Holborn Hill.
I don't know what reasonable expectations would be for English college majors, but to claim that anyone having trouble understanding this text "can't read" seems rather much.
I believe your modernisation attempt misinterprets the dino reference and its connection to the the previous clause about the floods; should it not rather be something like Mud overflowed the streets, as though the waters had only just retired from the face of the earth and it would not be shocking to meet a dinosaur etc. etc.
Although, as the comments on the original post discuss, this does rely on background knowledge that when Dickens was writing, there were popular theories associating dinosaurs with the Biblical flood.
For my part, I confused 'Megalosaurus' with 'Megalodon' and pictured a large shark stranded writhing on Holborn Hill by the sudden loss of its waters; an error which, paradoxically, helped me get closer to the intended meaning (which was, we know now, itself incorrect).
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the Triceratops wouldn't be appropriate here. The point here is that the Megalosaurus was a real-life sea monster. The metaphor in the text is that it would appear that a flood had come and gone - which in prehistoric times, might have deposited a sea monster. No flood actually happened though.
EDIT: Damn, I'm mistaken. Before anyone points it out, the Megalosaurus was a land animal. It was a dinosaur whose bones were first discovered in the 1820s. I got it confused with a Megalodon or Mosasaurus.
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