Originally published at: Moby Dick translated into Gen Z English | Boing Boing
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If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren’t you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it’s pretty hypocritical to think that I’m being weird about roasted chicken when I’ve never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters
All this time I thought they were for storing grain.
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I remember coming across an “updated” piece of scripture in a pamphlet, dated about 1970, and it went something like; “Jesus said, 'Guys, pay the Man your taxes; it’s all groovy”
Also;
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“i mean i’m ishmael. as though you’d care and just like everyone else buried in student debt…”
(dYears/dGen: 17, 26, 17, 18 15, 15, 15, 10… (so much for a ‘reproductive’ generation being 20-30 years))
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Years later I will still occasionally say “Call me, maybe” in a piratey nautical voice
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This is crazy.
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If a person under 25 read this, it would be like reading fanfic about yourself written by a stranger who’d watched you through binoculars while fuming at the things they guessed you to be saying and thinking.
Also, it cannot be said enough that “generations” are a bullshit marketing construct created to train and segregate the livestock (i.e. you). It’s like astrology, but without the smart ideas or good intentions.
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Half of what makes Moby Dick a great novel is the actual prose. It seems like a veiled insult to “Gen Z” to assume it needs to be translated for them.
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Literally to make money… it’s a marketing ploy…
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Moby was a Pisces (obviously). Today their lucky numbers are 4 and 13.
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Statistically it’s late teens to early forties
The “Gens” we’ve been assigned to are more like half-generations, with the Greatest Generation being the grandparents of the Millennials and the Silents being the grandparents of Gen Z
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I don’t think there’s anything veiled about it. The whole point of the exercise is to insult the youth by putting words in their mouths to mock them for (while subtly framing yourself in Melville’s peer group).
To be fair to the Tumblr postr, their post is titled “…Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom”; it’s the BB headline that introduces the overtly lawn-defending “Gen Z” language.
There’s always been a certain type of young person who tries to play 30 years older, and that’s still annoying too, but then, embarrassing poses are what people do when they’re young. People who actually have the maturity have less excuse.
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Came here to say the same thing
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The unconvincing part of the translation is that anyone these days would think that going sailing would be the answer to meloncholy, let alone whaling.
Not that there’s anything wrong with sailing, except that it’s not what it was when the original story was written. I’m trying to think what a modern person would do instead. A road trip maybe?
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