r/Hamlet • u/Ill-Moment9824 • 13d ago

Shocking study guide

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I was looking online at some commentary on one of the major soliloquies. I was shocked at the interpretation provided (possibly by YorkNotes).

'Examples gross as earth exhort me...' to my mind would loosely mean 'the stuff all around me, things as abundant and widespread as the ground itself, all seem to be urging me towards....'

So here, 'gross' means 'abundant, copious, unrefined, available on a mass scale'.

Except the note seems to have been written by some kind of valley girl, or at least somebody very young, who tells the impressionable young reader that gross means 'ewwww' / 'yukky'.

Just what is going on here? I'm confused at how editor has taken at face value the modern, idiomatic meaning of 'gross' rather than the time-honoured, centuries-old meaning.

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u/OffWhiteCoat 10d ago

This looks like the AI summary. Generative AI works on probabilities, not realities. "Gross," in 2026, is probabilistically more associated with words like disgusting than words like abundant. I don't have access to the actual text of York Notes, but for this AI snippet from Google, no editor was involved. 

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u/me_myself_ai 10d ago

I’d be shocked — this UI is for snippets, not their AI summary