551–560 of 992 posts
I have this recurring thought with each instance of this neo-puritanism I come across. It feels like society is losing patience for all things human. I sense contempt, almost hatred for the very things that unite us as living beings and separate us from computers. We're not perfect. We live in both place and time. We are born prejudice and survive prejudice. We form opinions through experience. We're practical, funct…
> Language evolves. Few would defend retaining the “n-word” in contemporary publishing, or any number of other outdated racial slurs which bring the modern reader up short and do not add to the text. But where does sensible pruning give way to unnecessary tinkering? Perfect example of the slippery slope. It started with racial slurs and here we are.
Semi-contrarian position here - I've never liked Dahl, and I was always annoyed by how he was pushed on me by the literary types in early school (the same ones that wanted me to read The Great Gatsby and The Stranger eventually). But I think that those people had some goal behind pushing him, and perhaps that goal is consistent with the rewriting? Something about kids who feel like outsiders (maybe???)? Very differen…
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…
At least "bad" wasn't changed to "doubleplusungood", but it feels like that's not far away at this rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, The Witches is full of obviously intentional antisemitic tropes: https://www.heyalma.com/is-roald-dahls-the-witches-antisemit...
[flagged]
'Jews are controlling the media' isn't antisemitic? 'der Stuermer' was depicting caricature Jews with long noses just for the fun of it? And yes, fictional conspiracies were a big deal in antisemitic propaganda - 'the protocols of the elders of zion' is just an example.
I have this recurring thought with each instance of this neo-puritanism I come across. It feels like society is losing patience for all things human. I sense contempt, almost hatred for the very things that unite us as living beings and separate us from computers. We're not perfect. We live in both place and time. We are born prejudice and survive prejudice. We form opinions through experience. We're practical, funct…
It's also incredibly insulting and disrespectful to Dahl to meddle with his work.
The endless critiquing & editing types should instead write new books and see if anyone's interested in their 'new' ideas.
It all reminds me of the 1980's era of putting antibiotics in plastic children's toys in case they might chew on them and get 'contaminated' by germs. We have to build up resistance along with critical reasoning skills but there's lots of evidence the kids just built up a lot of resistance to the antibiotics and the germs were good at building up immunities.
In the Victorian era 'Father Christmas' was conceptually green, skinny and 'good'. His opposite was Krampus who was bad, with lots of scary images of him carrying off terrified children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus
Over time Coca cola et al made Santa's imagery fat, jolly, 'unopposed' and therefore meaningless, and now that tradition is reduced to a saccharin sweet gift giving orgy to children.
We are having similar conceptual erasure imposed on us in so many areas of society this decade and it is not going to end well.
Rewriting stories for children to reflect the values and anxieties of contemporary culture has occurred forever. For instance, see “The Family Shakespeare” by the Bowdlers. Interestingly, critics seemed to pan it for similar reasons to HN’s commentators, but the book sold well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare I’m considerably less dogmatic about this than I used to be. Enid Blyton was a staple of…
"That man looks foreign" is one of many exact quotes from any number of her series.
Man I hope they don’t alter any of his adult short story collections
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While engaging in linguistic pedantry, antennae are for insects, antennas are for signals.
What the fuck https://grammarist.com/usage/antennae-antennas/ I can't even.
Rewriting stories for children to reflect the values and anxieties of contemporary culture has occurred forever. For instance, see “The Family Shakespeare” by the Bowdlers. Interestingly, critics seemed to pan it for similar reasons to HN’s commentators, but the book sold well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare I’m considerably less dogmatic about this than I used to be. Enid Blyton was a staple of…
100% agree with the Enid Blyton take. I loved Blyton's books as a kid, to the point I actually developed a British-esque accent from reading them so much (I'm Australian). But if I had children, I would not read those books to them as they are. They're full of racist, sexist and generally outdated language, and were written by someone who was considered overly conservative for the 1930s !! As long as the original boo…