Posted by Mike Field on August 01, 2009 at 14:55:27 user mikefield.
In Reply to: Re: Bowdlerisation (was Profound disagreement (was Thoughts on ) posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on August 01, 2009 at 11:13:57:
.
Well, if people are now advocating retaining the original version of books as they were written, but also publishing the same works "Edited for the younger reader" in parallel with the originals, then the argument has changed.
I wouldn't (necessarily) disagree with the concept (although I have to say that I dreaded reading those words in quotes on the title page of any book I picked up as a kid; and when I did I refused to read the offending book on principle.) What I would be concerned about though is that once it was realised that the cost of publishing parallel editions was prohibitive, the PC Police among us (some would call them 'wowsers') would ensure that it was the originals that were dropped, not the expurgated versions.
If I can paraphrase part of my reply to another TarBoard reader who emailed me today about this topic, for the two words in question I think it’s a pretty wide-spread view here (and I assume in the UK and the US and elsewhere) that they’re now considered to be words derogatory of people of African descent, or indeed dark-skinned people in general. As I pointed out earlier, they used not to be so considered but people have been taught in recent years to now view them as such.
I personally don’t have any problems with ‘negro.’ Wikipedia again -- “Negro" means "black" in Spanish, Portuguese, and ancient Italian; all of these derive from the Latin niger (i.e., "black").” Black is black as far as I’m concerned, just as green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, and all the other colours are just those colours. In the same way we use, for indigenous Australians, ‘aborigine’ or ‘aborignal’ (which simply mean ‘native’ or ‘native to’ and of course are not confined exclusively to Australian usage. I confess that it's becoming more commonplace now to refer to aboriginals as "indigenous Australians," even though by so doing the meaning of 'indigenous' is being shaded somewhat.)
I would certainly agree that ‘nigger’ is considered a derogatory term these days, and I myself wouldn’t use that word in normal speech for that reason. Nor would I use the word ‘abo’ any longer either. But both are really only abbreviations or contractions, both used to be perfectly acceptable in common language, and both appear in well-respected writings from earlier years -- including AR's.
If I were reading those earlier writings to younger readers today I would read what had been written, but explain that current usage would no longer allow us to use those words the way they were used in the books, and why.
(By the way, I remember being very taken aback to hear a little while ago that some English film-makers of a TV version of S&A had euphemistically changed Titty's name to "Kitty" -- presumably because they couldn't bear for children to be reminded that women had breasts... Now that's bowdlerisation for you.)
I don’t (usually) intentionally give offence to anyone by my use of words, but I also don’t like being mealy-mouthed with them either -- which simply means that while I mightn’t call a spade a ‘bloody shovel,’ I am certainly not going to call it a ‘manual excavation instrument’ to satisfy any future wowser who might decide that 'spade' had now become a Naughty Word.
"Mum's out, Dad's out, let's talk rude -- pee, po, belly, bum, drawers."