Unlike Dracula, where the theme is that Dracula is this ancient folkloric tradition from this creepy primitive country invading the new modern world, the whole theme of Frankenstein as a work of literature revolves around the horror of modernity creating a truly brand new thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
You can call Frankenstein's monster a kind of zombie or "flesh golem" or whatever you want to call it but by doing that you're destroying the whole point of the story All of the angst and horror is because Victor supposedly did something that's never been done before
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Replying to @arthur_affect @dreamingnoctis and
Yeah - And it's a weird double-move, because often the modern equivalents of Frankensteins kind of drop the doctor directly, or sideline him. Jurassic Park, Terminator, the Matrix, etc. The doctor is all of us.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @dreamingnoctis and
RUR, which gave us the word "robot", is obviously directly inspired by Frankenstein, and started the trend of making the horror worse by making the artificial people be the result of industrial capitalism rather than a single crazy scientist
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
And the word "robot" was continuing this theme They have a name but it's a *brand* name, their whole species is named after what they were intend to do, work
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Replying to @arthur_affect @dreamingnoctis and
Yeah - and it's already a Czech word; the association is new, but he might as well have called them serfs, or slaves, or just workers.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @dreamingnoctis and
Well, the thing is it's not the normal word for a "worker", it's literally dehumanizing - "worker" is "robotnik", the "-nik" is the suffix for a person (like "-er") It's just "work", or maybe like making up an English word "workies"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
Čapek's original idea was to try to make up some dog-Latin word that gave this impression, like "Labori" (plural of "Laborus", which is bad fake Latin - "worker" in Latin is "laborator")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
He asked his brother Josef if "Labori" sounded too clinical and his brother said "Just call them 'robots'" Which, in Czech, was kind of a joke, which Čapek felt was inspired and ran with but is kind of lost in English today
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
Like if I said "What do I call this slave race if Labori sounds too formal" and he said "Just call them Workos"
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It's one of those deliberately lazy coinages, like, I dunno, "hotties" or "normies"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @dreamingnoctis and
Actually, one kind of funny translation would have been "Serfers"
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Replying to @mssilverstein @dreamingnoctis and
A frequently proposed English translation has been "Drudgers" I'm partial to "Drafties" ("Robota" in Czech originally referred specifically to forced labor, i.e. corvee labor, a lord could extract from his subjects as tax)
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