Posted by Dave Thewlis on February 26, 2011 at 16:50:43 user dthewlis.
In Reply to: Re: English versus American usage posted by andybolger on February 26, 2011 at 10:45:08:
Andy, my enquiry was entirely innocent; I was really just trying to find out if the publishers of the American edition of this book had modified the text to replace nouns with ones they deemed more familiar to American readers. The canonical example of course, and the one that caused an outcry, was when Scholastic published the American edition of the first Harry Potter book as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" for the (alleged) reason that American children didn't know big words like "Philosopher".
This has been discussed before on TarBoard without as far as I know inciting any class or other wars. I am really hoping that someone with access to the original (1949?) edition in the U.K. can tell me if the terms are the same in it as in the edition I have access to; I would like to know if the "Americanization" practice for children's books was common prior to Scholastic's idiotic decision.