Bowdlerisation (was Profound disagreement (was Thoughts on )


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Posted by Mike Field on August 01, 2009 at 00:21:25 user mikefield.

In Reply to: Re: Profound disagreement (was Thoughts on ) posted by Dave Thewlis on July 31, 2009 at 22:51:05:

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Sorry, Dave and Andrew, but I'm afraid I agree with Owen. And I don't agree with censorship. Changing words in a written text because they later come to offend someone is indeed the top of a slippery slope.

Half a century or so after these books were written, some readers (who knows how many, or whether they form a majority or not?) have learned to take exception to some of the words used. As a result, as Andrew advocates, perhaps a publisher bowdlerises his new print run to accommodate those people and their word prejudices. In another fifty years, who knows what other words new generations will have learned to dislike in the texts? Are publishers then to further rewrite the original authors' works?

In my view the text should be left untouched. And I don't care if the author is Ransome, Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Henry Miller. If it contains, as in this case, the words "negro" or "nigger," (gasp, how dare I not use asterisks?) then so be it. They were the words the author used at that date. Even if s/he intentionally meant them to be shocking (as AR did not,) they still said what the author wanted to say at the time. For me, that's the end of the argument.


When I first learnt to sing "Old Man River," I learnt the first line as, "Black folks work on the Mississippi...." A more recent published version of the song has it written as, "Coloured folks work on the Mississippi..." But just a few months ago I bought a remastered CD of Lawrence Tibbett singing that song in the early 1930s (ie at about the same time as AR was writing his books,) and I was amazed to hear him sing, "Niggers all work on the Mississippi...." -- amazed because, for so long apparently, I had been listening to censored versions of the song. I assume that this last version is indeed the one that Oscar Hammerstein actually wrote. It is therefore, to my mind, the correct one -- whatever exception people have later learned to take to one of the words, for whatever reasons of their own (and even if I agreed with those reasons.)

The only wonder I have in all this is that any writings should be bowdlerised to kowtow to the "political correct" views of a later time.

And as a postscript I would add that even the word "bowdlerisation" is itself not much more than a politically-correct version of the word "censorship."



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