11.23.2003

Idiom's Delight
The Bright Young Things website contains a wonderful device called The Splendidiser. Give it a swatch of prose, or even an entire website, and it will convert it to the language of the "bright young things" of 1920s London. For example, here's what it did -- with absolutely no assistance from me, I swear -- to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth marvellously on this continent, a simply unbearable new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the bloody proposition that all men are shriekworthily created equal. It's just too dull.

I say, now we are frightfully engaged in a dratted great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure, my dear fellow! Good God old chap, we are, and I don't mean to be bogus, met fabulously on a great battle-field of that war. Now see here - we have come to dedicate a ghastly portion of that field, as a frightfully divine final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. How shaming! I dare say, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Golly!

My dear child, but, in a horrid larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. Splendid! Spiffingly on the shriekworthy contrary, the ghastly brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our bogus power to add or detract. The priceless shame! Darling, the simply dashing world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. How boring! My dear child, it is dreadfully for us the simply dashing living, rather, to be dedicated here to the simply bogus unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. The horrid shame! Dear me, it is bloody rather for us to be here dedicated to the horrid great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the ghastly last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a divine new birth of freedom -- and that government of the frightfully boring people, by the people, for the ghastly people, shall not perish from the simply dandy earth. Ugh, how morbid!


Check out the Splendidised version of Danger Blog! (I can't make a link to it -- you'll just have to plop the web address into the ol' Splendidiser yourself.) Or Splendidise other websites. It's quite a lot of fun. The Splendidiser is, in a word, splendid.