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Originally posted by rivka:
I prefer Hamlet.

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I am going to respectfully venture the hypothesis that this is because you're not on Facebook.

The Hamlet one didn't ring true to me at all... mostly for idiomatic reasons, but partly because it's hard to imagine Hamlet being into Facebook in the first place. By contrast, social networking is central to Austen's world... and the status lines there read exactly like the real thing.

(Two examples: "Lydia Bennet and Kitty Bennet joined the group 1,000,000 Strong Against the Officers Leaving Meryton!" is brilliantly on-target; there are any number of Facebook groups with similar names, and those two would certainly be in such a group if they had Facebook pages. By contrast, "The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies." strikes me as contrived, requiring us to equate an online game with actual death. The metaphor doesn't hold up.)

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Originally posted by Shmuel:
I am going to respectfully venture the hypothesis that this is because you're not on Facebook.

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Originally posted by rivka:
Or the fact that I hate every work of Austen's I have every forced myself to slog through might be relevant.

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Ah, yes, that would do it as well.

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Originally posted by ketchupqueen:
Doesn't mean it wasn't funny.

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