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Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#381

Post by smaudet »

mc32 wrote: post #251
krona wrote: post #231

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered... Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. - George Orwell

People (ok, old school liberals -like the Clintons- as well as libertarians and other freedom loving classes) used to make fun of sects and other religious minorities with uhh, different sensibilities who were too prudish or uptight for their alternative censored versions of popular works --well, the joke's on us! The speed at which history is being colonized to retroactively establish a new reality is pretty astound…

There is a time and place for both crass language and flowery language. You would get severely penalized for speaking in "high english" in some places, just as you would not (usually) want to cuss out everyone in your boardroom meeting.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#382

Post by nonethewiser »

bitwize wrote: post #110
bko wrote: post #15

Here's a good list of changes. Most are about removing any references to ugly or fat. But also other strange things like changing the author's Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck, not calling people crazy, swapping screeching to annoying, removing brothers and sisters to favor "siblings" and using "folks" instead of "ladies and gentlemen" https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1626860237104…

Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling wrote favorably about colonialism; they were replaced with more agreeable authors. Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people. It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.

[flagged]

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#383

Post by jrmg »

neverrroot wrote: post #330
jrmg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offensive is probably too strong a word. The reason to replace an aggregate ‘brothers and sisters’ with ‘siblings’, ‘mothers and fathers’ with ‘parents’, or ‘boys and girls’ with ‘children’ is because for all of these the replacement suffices without calling attention to gender when it’s not necessary to do so. There’s also an argument that the ‘X and Y’ phrasing makes the ‘X’ seem more important than the ‘Y’, or mak…

No, it’s not the same thing. Parents it’s plural of parent, “10 fathers” are “10 parents”, so are “10 mothers”. When you want to convey the important point that it’s both mothers and fathers, there is no alternative. Similarly for everything else. Regarding the first occurrence being conceived as more important, it’s the reason usually females appear named first, a sign of courtesy to them. That was sorted out neatly…

I think you’re assuming some sort of extreme militancy about non-gendered language that I don’t have.

Yes, of course you’d need to be specific if it was important. I’d use ‘10 parents’ only if it wasn’t important.

Your example isn’t great though. Even if you assume binary gender for all parents in the group, you couldn’t replace ‘10 parents’ with ‘10 mothers and fathers’ because it’s unclear whether there are 20 people or 10. You’d need to be specific (‘6 mothers and 4 fathers’ or the like).

I don’t think your second paragraph refutes mine at all. I obviously don’t agree that it was ‘sorted out neatly long ago’. You could assume that from the fact that I’ve rethought my own behavior. This world would be a much worse place than it is if people never reconsidered whether the status quo from long ago was optimal.

[Edit: I see now that this comment was not on the same branch as the one where I said I’d rethought my own behavior from a default of e.g. ‘boys and girls’ to ‘children’, so I take back the sentence about you not seeing that. The rest stands though.]

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#384

Post by nonethewiser »

heavyset_go wrote: post #144
ilyt wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your triggers are your responsibility; you can just not read author instead of pushing for and celebrating desecration of their work. > once you take a position of empathy. ...and the usual thinly veiled "if you don't agree with my opinion you're a Bad Person". How about taking position of sensibility for once ?

> Your triggers are your responsibility; you can just not read author instead of pushing for and celebrating desecration of their work. The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.

[flagged]

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#385

Post by neverrroot »

gameman144 wrote: post #361

As a genuine question, what is the best way to combat things like this as an individual? I will obviously choose not to buy egregious rewrites like this, but Penguin is out maybe ten bucks from my decision on that front. I've got neither the skillset nor the bandwidth to attempt to organize boycotts or anything, and don't have the pubic clout to call public retribution down on the publisher. I'm asking because I stro…

I think the most important of it all is not to keep silent about such non-sense. Way too many are afraid to open their mouth, afraid of not offending anyone, afraid of any potentially ensuing discussions etc.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#386

Post by jiscariot »

bee_rider wrote: post #365

Making some political waves is a sure-fire way to move some units, and in a year this’ll all be forgotten (hey has any publisher ever released a “classic edit” version of a book, to play both sides?). I mean how much money do you expect publishers to leave on the table in the interest of preserving the version of a book you personally liked?

So it's actually capitalism at fault--not the publishers rewriting the original texts? Interesting take.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#387

Post by numeromancer »

> These school people hate literature. It stands for everything that they stand against. A work of literature comes from one, solitary mind, not from the consensus of a collective. It is an unequivocal assertion that this is so. It abides, or it dies, but it will not negotiate. It comes before us neither as a supplicant nor a defendant, but as a judge. It cares nothing for our favorite notions or our self-esteem. And it offends in us what most deserves offense–petulant sectarian touchiness, facile social supposition, and especially smug self-righteousness. Thus it is that the educationists’ literature is not the real thing. They must abbreviate it, or amend it, or–and this is their usual practice–elucidate it, lest their students fail to appreciate correctly its relevance to “the issues being examined.” And should the work at hand have nothing to do with the issues they want to examine, they must concoct an “instructional material” and call it Jack and the Beanstalk.

-- The Underground Grammarian

https://sourcetext.com/grammarian-newslettersv06-html/

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#388

Post by NDizzle »

swatcoder wrote: post #181

Those of us who grew up near various religious communities in the second half of the twentieth century are familiar with the edited and abridged versions of media made to be more palatable to the morals of whichever community, as well as the scandals over media which were an affront to them for whatever reason. Obviously, a publisher committed to those communities and who can get the rights to do so will make a “clea…

Can you give me an example of whatever community it is that you grew up in?

Me? Rural northern Arkansas. Dry county. Unaffected by these edited/abridged version of media.

In other words, Han shot first in my day, sonny.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#389

Post by pessimizer »

consumer451 wrote: post #335
pessimizer wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justifying censorship with other censorship is a spiral of doom.

I'm sorry, maybe I don't understand your reply. Did you read my comment as some sort of justification of either the Dahl estate's rewriting of Dahl's work or the state sponsored censorship in happening in Florida?

I read it as, "we're complaining about Democrats when we should really be complaining about Republicans." I apologize if that was unfair.

edit: even though you've made a careful distinction between "rewriting" and censorship here that a lot of people who support censorship make. I'm probably projecting this upon you, but it goes along with the diabolical "It's not censorship unless the government does it, and when the government does it, it's fighting hate and misinformation."

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#390

Post by Gigachad »

josephg wrote: post #257
mcguire wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most cogent analysis I've seen is that the changes were made by the owners of the books in order to sell more books.

From the article: > The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works. I suspect they're hoping netflix will make movies based on his books. Netflix seems pretty sensitive…

Surely the success of Hogwarts Legacy shows you can just completely ignore twitter and nothing happens.
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