Hspell 0.4 announcement
"The Kenigsberg Address"

The original announcement

References

The text of this announcement is based on Abraham Lincoln's famous speech, "The Gettysburg Address".

Lincoln's original speech was given November 19th, 1863, at the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, at the site of a major civil-war battle that took place several months earlier. His speech meant to remind Americans that the civil war was about a greater issue, freedom. For this reason this speech has become an important historic speech, studied and memorized by schoolchildren all across America. Its first words, "Four score and seven years ago" (meaning 87 years ago, referring to the year 1776) are so distinctive and memorizable, that anyone who ever saw this speech was likely to recognize our announcement as a parody of it.

This release was planned for exactly 87 days after the first Hspell release (which had been on December 13, 2002), making the "four score and seven days ago" opening highly relevant. Dan Kenigsberg sent this announcement, and labeled it "The Kenigsberg Address", which was another big hint that this is a parody on the Gettysburg Address.

Most of the text of this announcement are direct quotes from Lincoln's speech (go and read the original!), with mentions of war, cemeteries or casualties cut out or replaced by happier mentions of spelling, websites and Hspell versions.

We hope that our humoristic treatment of Lincoln's speech will not appear as disrespect towards Lincoln or the dead of the American Civil War. On the contrary, we hope that one side-effect of this announcement is more Israeli people getting to know Lincoln and his timeless heritage.