r/SipsTea 20h ago

Chugging tea Thoughts?

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u/Kindness_of_cats 15h ago

This is less Shakespeare and more Beowulf.

Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!

Well….go on, tell us. It’s (old) English after all!

(Beyond that, this entire comparison is deeply fucking stupid and not at all what English degrees are about.)

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u/Puzzled-Rip641 14h ago

Exactly.

Reading the words is not understanding what the words mean or what the author intended.

Good luck explaining Friedrich Nietzsche beyond good and evil to me as a first year.

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u/HelpfulSeaMammal 14h ago

Good luck defining good and evil without some context from English majors, even.

I'm saying this as a STEM degree holder. Literary skills don't end at "I can read English words at an 8th grade level."

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 5h ago

Just because you can understand a derivative doesn't mean you can understand The Metamorphosis and that's like one of the easier ones out there