----- Original Message ----- From: "Her Serene Highness" <mbuch@mcsp.com>

After all, you can't understand Shakespeare unless you read him in the original Klingon.

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You can- if you're educated. Plenty of people understand Shakespeare. Even high school students. People in Italy can read Shakespeare. Tiny children can also- they could at the beginning of this century. My badly-educated, at-risk high school students were able to understand Shakespeare. If you don't, that says more about you than it does about early modern English. And some of us can even parse Beowulf- with a two-language version (which is how it's usually printed) the average person can read an amazing amount of it in the original, or at least grasp it. Maybe if you stopped reading Star Trk novels as literature, you'd realize you read Shakespeare's language pretty much every day. His turns of phrase are used all the time, and can be understood by people of all economic level who have the desire to read an learn- even people who cannot affor $99 ebooks to read Stephen King novels (not theat Stephen King is bad, but there's more to reading than that).<<

First of all, Anne's comment was an off-the-cuff, tongue-in-cheek ... JOKE. Second, I wouldn't make fun of Star Trek fans. They tend to be higher educated and have read more things like Shakespeare than the average Joe (I don't have the link to source of the information, but I remember reading it somewhere). Third, your comments are really making you sound like an academic elitist. And I don't think you are or mean to be. Josh