Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on August 01, 2009 at 20:28:17 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Bowdlerisation (was Profound disagreement (was Thoughts on ) posted by Ed Kiser on August 01, 2009 at 20:03:03:
You haven't got the point.
Peter Ceresole has, thank goodness.
The flag shown if you require a Pilot is now G (vertical blue and yellow bars) because S means "my engines are going aStern" (this matches the Morse code sound signal - three short blasts.
The buoy at the entrance to Hamford Water is not a small black one but a red and white safe water mark.
The Beach End buoy is green not red; when I first saw it it was black and it has not been red for a very long time.
Children now wear lifejackets in dinghies and they often carry mobile phones.
None of this matters a damn (Ransome word).
I said, quite clearly, that there is no case for adding anything to the text, any more than Thomas Bowdler did to Shakespeare. Please have the courtesy to at least read what I wrote and do me the credit of assuming that I meant it.
People who contribute to this generally very agreeable forum are adults - we may be somewhat child like in our enthusiasm for a children's writer of seventy years ago, but we are adults, discussing books that we have known for a very long time.
If you are content for the books to become dead "classics", to disappear from children's bookshops and from school libraries, perhaps to go out of print, then there is no need to change anything.
If, on the other hand, you want these books to be discovered and read by new generations of the children for whom they were, after all, written, then three words have got to go, unless, perhaps, you want to inscribe
WHITES ONLY
on the covers.
Well do you?
(feel free to add the Clint Eastword expleteive at the end, because it expresses my feelings exactly)