i feel like the melody is from an elvis presley song it sounds so familiar

You should read Slaughterhouse Five by K. Vonnegut. I learnt to love English after reading that novel.

Oui!

Try The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Brilliant story, simply written

It's ideas like these that create hell on earth. Only lunatics believe in Utopias. Even Kurt Vonnegut and Orwell didn't believe in such things. Thus, the creation of stories like these.

“Why is there something instead of nothing?” “There isn’t.”

life is cruel

I'm pretty sure Kurt Vonnegut Jr. didn't much care how people pronounced the title, or that they even spoke it aloud, because the whole point of the story title is not how it sounds but how it appears as written. The irony of Hamlet's speculation of the value of life vs. death expressed in an alphanumeric acronym that symbolizes the story's cold, calculating world (1 birth + 1 death = stability) is the entire point of the title. The nice touch of the title being a phone number in the style of the 1940s - 1950s, mixing numbers with letters (cf. the movie Butterfield 8, Calling Northside 777, etc.) is a little bonus.

He was an American, and back then some people had pronounced zeroes before other numbers as "ought". Like when pronouncing .30-06, you would say "thirty ought six". Or maybe he thought it a little too on the nose to use naught, wanted to add subtlety.

Agree

@Evan Bynum Explain what part?

@Evan Bynum I’m going to chime in on this. So basically the numeral zero, “0”, can be said as both aught/ought and naught. Edward Malc and Paul Zink were discussing the reader’s choice on the correct way to pronounce “0” when reading the story’s title and the phone number. The Shakespeare quote from Hamlet is “To be or not to be...” and the phone number in the story is 2 B R 0 2 B. Personally, I’ve always read it as “two be or naught two be.” It sounds just Hamlet’s quote. The “r” sounds kinda like “or” and that point was made in Edward’s original comment. But the confusing and interesting aspect of this story’s title/phone number is how to pronounce that dang “0”. If we say “naught/nought” then it sounds just like “not” and it sounds just like the Shakespeare quote. If we say “aught/ought” like the reader in this video does, there is now a new double meaning. The Hamlet quote changes into “to be or ‘ought’ to be. As in, “to live or should/have a reason to continue to live.” Both pronunciations give the title/phone number significant meanings. And it is fun to think about the different possible meanings and intentions of the author. I personally have no idea Vonnegut’s preferred way to pronounce the “0” and I wonder what his opinion would be about a group of strangers pondering this detail over text through the internet and over the span of years (and a global pandemic to top things off.) I also found an article that discusses the confusing history of ought, aught, naught, and nought. Each has its own meaning ,while also all meaning the same thing. All or nothing. Yup yup. archives.cjr.org/language_corner/language_corner_072814.php

(^`-`)^ boi wdym