Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Latinometer

[First posted in AWOL 29 July 2014, updated 13 July 2016]

Latinometer
A Latinometer™ gives you reading on how others read you. Insert your prose into the slot below and find out! Too Germanic? You sound dumb! Too Latinate? You sound like a liar.
Then click here to find out which Jane Austen character you sound most like.
If you do not like the way you sound, click on a colored word to take you to its Germanic and Latinate synonyms in thesaurus.com.
Jane Austen wrote in the horse-and-buggy days, before the car, the plane, the computer, and the Pill, the inventions that have defined modern society. Yet her characters seem as fresh as when they first stepped off the page.

The Latinometer™ opens a window onto her workshop where she forged the characters who still seem real after two centuries. Snobs like Sir Walter Elliot (Persuasion) and feminists like Mrs. Elton (of Emma) are alive and well even today.

If you followed people around with a tape recorder, they would not seem as real as Austen made her characters sound. The Latinometer™ shows how she played one side of the English language against the other.
Germanic & Latinate
Jane Austen 

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