The Philistines Have a Point (or, the children long for linguistics)

Today’s philistines, tech bros, and most joyless internet denizens have a new cause. See exhibit A below. After all the abuse English majors have had to take for “getting a degree in reading novels,” etc., it turns out that literature is actually too hard for normal people, unimaginably esoteric and confusing. Some of these people want to read ChatGPT summaries of books instead of, god forbid, the books themselves. Some think that nobody should have to read books at all, or at least nothing above a sixth-grade level. And still others, like the guy below, want older literature updated, “translated” into contemporary English to make it more comprehensible. And I don’t just mean Beowulf, I mean Shakespeare, maybe Austen or Dickens or even, according to this person, Vonnegut and Didion.

Unsurprisingly, the author of the above tweet has been subjected to merciless mockery (his tweet has since been deleted). For one thing, “all lit from pre-1970” includes a great deal of work that is straightforwardly easy to understand. My gen-alpha nephews can converse easily with my parents, who were born in 1953. The English of 1970 sounds a lot like the English of 2025. If you are a fluent English speaker and you think that The Great Gatsby or 1984 is some kind of incomprehensible tome, that probably just means you aren’t very bright.

But even if we narrow the parameters to speak solely about pre-twentieth century works, arguing that we should “translate,” say, Jane Eyre, it’s clear that this guy either does not understand literature, or just outright hates it. The purpose of life, believe it or not, isn’t sheer seamless ease—nor is the purpose of literature finding the fastest route to make some given independently existing point. The “point” of a novel doesn’t swing bare like a bulb in an empty room, waiting for someone to grab hold of it. The joy is in the reading. It’s in the immersion. Literature is living in language, the same way that swimming is living in water. The people who want to cut out the language, prioritizing ease and speed over every other goal, are essentially asking: “why don’t we just pave over the swimming pool and walk from one side to the other, instead of having a pool party? Can’t we just skip all the splashing around?” And yet in a strange accidental way this man, this hater of literature, has a point.