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Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#12I read this a few times, looking for evidence I missed that it's a joke. Apparently not, but I can't be sure. If it's serious, it's possibly the worst article I've ever read.
> But fans of Macbeth often say its freaky qualities are deeper than just the plot devices and characters. For centuries, people been unsettled by the very language of the play.
> Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.
> For centuries, Shakespeare fans and theater folk have wondered about this, but could never quite explain it.
The article claims to explain it - in the play, the word "the" is used a lot!
Um.. gee, in high school it was pointed out to me how constant themes in Macbeth are how unnatural things have become, how everything is strange, qualities/values reversed from normal - fair is foul and foul is fair etc, animals doing weird things, bad omens etc. It never stops, all the way through. I had to go through the play and list how many animals are mentioned, doing strange things. It's constant. People meet and it's not "Lovely day isn't it" but an anecdote about how so-and-so saw something incredibly weird and impossible happen. Over that background is the quickly escalating paranoia and madness of Macbeth & Lady Macbeth. Etc. Can't be bothered writing more, I didn't want to say just "This is total nonsense.", but it is. (Flagged.)
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#13I'd wager the use of "the" is mostly about making the meter work and having the iambic pentameter sound the way he wanted it to. This isn't a data science question. Especially if the data science is blind to meter and to phonetics.
Shakespeare coined (or at least first wrote down) hundreds of neologisms presumably just to make the verses scan. His English was never the best, honestly. Like, in terms of being normal English. Much of his poetry was creatively odd, but also grammatically odd at the time. He sounded unusual even to his contemporaries. That's part of why he made such a big splash.
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#14The conclusions of the article seem a bit far-fetched to me, and seem to ignore the rhetorical style of poetry and theatre at the time. One of the examples the author gives (where they missed a contracted instance of "the"):
> [...] Look like th' innocent flower,/But be the serpent under ’t.
It is still acceptable in modern English to say something like
> Seem like the innocent flower, but be as the serpent underneath it.
Certainly not casual, everyday speech -- but using a rhetorical strategy of referring to an archetypal innocent flower, or an archetypal serpent. I think it's an enormous stretch to claim that Lady Macbeth and Macbeth had a specific innocent flower in mind when they were speaking.
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#15I’m going to be a bit snobbish here: I can’t take the article seriously when it misquotes “Double, double toil and trouble” as “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”. Not so much because the mistake is egregious (it could make sense if you’re going by ear), but because the article claims to be about the language used, and this is one of the most famous lines in the play.
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#16I’m going to be a bit snobbish here: I can’t take the article seriously when it misquotes “Double, double toil and trouble” as “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”. Not so much because the mistake is egregious (it could make sense if you’re going by ear), but because the article claims to be about the language used, and this is one of the most famous lines in the play.
Sod that mate. The real problem is the weird quotes thing hereabouts. English uses 66 and 99 or this:". We never use double backticks and whatever the other thing is.
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#17[deleted]
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#18I’m going to be a bit snobbish here: I can’t take the article seriously when it misquotes “Double, double toil and trouble” as “Bubble, bubble toil and trouble”. Not so much because the mistake is egregious (it could make sense if you’re going by ear), but because the article claims to be about the language used, and this is one of the most famous lines in the play.
Sod that mate. The real problem is the weird quotes thing hereabouts. English uses 66 and 99 or this:". We never use double backticks and whatever the other thing is.
`` and '' is just unparsed markup.
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sod that mate. The real problem is the weird quotes thing hereabouts. English uses 66 and 99 or this:". We never use double backticks and whatever the other thing is.
`` and '' is just unparsed markup.
So where do the top right to bottom left ticks come from? They are not on my keyboard.
Obviously I can trivially recreate any character with some effort but those left slanting ticks are not on many keyboards.
Re: Overuse of the word “the” in “Macbeth”
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
`` and '' is just unparsed markup.
So where do the top right to bottom left ticks come from? They are not on my keyboard. Obviously I can trivially recreate any character with some effort but those left slanting ticks are not on many keyboards.
The backtick? That's generally the non-shift character on the "tilde key", generally right under the escape key. It's on most physical keyboards.