British teacher flawlessly translates everyday sayings into Victorian English, and people are hooked
“‘My faculties have been exhausted by perpetual toil’ goes hard.”
By Evan Porter
A British teacher is showing how to speak in Victorian English, and people are loving it. – Photo credit: Abram Elenin/Facebook
It’s hard to believe now, but communicating via the written word used to be a gigantic deal. Long before texting, social media, quick emails, or even short postcards, one of the only ways people could communicate across space and time was by writing long letters.
The 18th century is considered by some to be the peak of the Golden Age of letter writing. It was a key element of education for people wealthy enough to receive one, and it was incredibly important: business was conducted via handwritten letters, love was declared, and new introductions were made.
It was crucial, then, to choose your words extremely carefully. This was especially true in and around the Victorian Era in England, roughly between 1820 and 1914.
Victorian-era translations of everyday sayings
An English teacher from the United Kingdom has been delighting followers with Victorian-era translations of everyday sayings.
Abram Elenin runs Berber English, where he says, “I help professionals master British English… and communicate more effectively.”
He also likes to have a little fun with his work as a linguistics expert and accent coach. In a wildly popular series of Instagram Reels, he performs “tiered” translations of common phrases, transforming them into increasingly formal variations. Victorian English is usually the final resting point and comedic punchline.
In one popular video, “I’m burnt out” becomes “I’m entirely depleted” in formal English, and “I have been worked to the very marrow” in gentlemanly English.
But Victorian English, the age of beautiful if long-winded novels like Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, takes the cake: “Where to begin, for my faculties have been exhausted by perpetual toil, and incessant application has so stripped me of vitality that I am scarcely able to summon the strength requisite for the smallest effort.”
(The Instagram post, below. You don’t have to log in to see/hear.)
In another Reel, “I’m poor” becomes “I find myself in a precarious financial position,” and finally:
“It is with no small measure of affliction that I acknowledge my fortunes to be sadly diminished, my purse exhausted, and my station reduced to one of grievous penury, such that I find myself abandoned to the stern tutelage of want, the harshest master to which mankind is ever subject.”
It just sounds so much better that way. Can’t you just hear Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek saying that? (snip-a little MORE, with another little video)
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