It’s been a while since I’ve done a “sentence modernization” post, so let’s take some excerpts from The Beautiful and Damned and see what happens when we replace every word with more common equivalents.
It will be interesting to see if this makes much difference. As we saw earlier the book’s didn’t contain very many antiquated words, which suggests very little will need to change to make it modern. On the other hand, it did have a lot of unique words, which means that while we probably can’t make it sound any newer we can shift it to sound more main stream.
Original: Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man.
Normalized: Anthony left the home (feeling) remarkably joyful, and strangely bad for the old man.
Original: So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore.
Normalized: So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to determine, in their envy, that he was so swollen with pride as to be a bore.
Original: It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.
Normalized: it was vaguely believe between them that (at) some hazy time he would enter a form of glorified diplomatic work and be envied by princes and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.
Original: The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire solace and justification for what they chose to do and what consequence it brought.
Normalized: The brilliant position of not giving a damn changed overnight; from being a simple creed of Gloria’s it became the full relief and explanation for what they determined to do and what result they got.
In some ways I feel like this actually turned out better than when I run this script on older works; perhaps because the relatively modern writing style of The Beautiful and Damned meant that we truly could replace words on a word for word basis without running into the issue of having to try and transform older syntactical choices into more modern sentence formats.
