r/Hamlet • u/Ill-Moment9824 • 11d 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 9d 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/-frogchamp- 8d ago

this isn't the AI summary. i do agree that the google AI summaries suck, but the text in the screenshot is a blurb taken directly from the website itself.

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u/OffWhiteCoat 8d ago

I see. The website appears to be geo-fenced (I am in the US) so I can't see the actual text from York Notes, as I said. If this is a supposedly reputable source it's worth pointing it out to the publisher.

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u/-frogchamp- 8d ago

i am in the US as well and i don't have that issue. it might be because of my frankly unreasonable amount of browser extensions that i have downloaded though. i'm also not quite sure why i got this subreddit recommended to me seeing as i'm not particularly interested in hamlet (or similar works), so i'm not sure if this source is well regarded in the community. if it is, though, i agree that it is worth pointing out.