Washington's Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech

Stumbled upon this and found it interesting in light of the condition of the U.S.


Washington's Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech



I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his second term — is important. Apparently he lays down a lot of good ideas for America. But the common style of writing and vocabulary has changed since then. Maybe people have gotten dumber, too. Either way, the result is that it’s kind of a pain to read sometimes. Particularly tricky are the odd compound sentence structures, where it’s hard to keep track of what the subject is.

Having never read the whole thing, I thought it would be interesting to go through and try to transcribe it into some sort of casual modern speech. I wouldn’t try to recreate the prose and would probably miss out on subtleties and shades of meaning (and no doubt occasionally miss the point completely), but at least I’d get the idea of what he was talking about.

So I pulled up a copy off Wikisource and started reading and typing. Here’s the result:


A Bastardization of George Washington’s Farewell Address...

(follow link to avoid wall of text, and the 50% source thingy)

[link to blog.xkcd.com]


Thoughts?