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

telegraph.co.uk

531–540 of 992 posts

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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah; I don’t know why it’s taken people so long to realise this. I know it seems to people on Twitter that everyone is on twitter, but that’s really not true. About 10% of people in the USA use Twitter daily - which is a huge number of eyeballs. But that still leaves the remaining 90% of people choosing instead to enjoy our short time on this planet. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts…

The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population. Even if 100% of them loudly proclaimed anything anywhere on any social media platform, it would barely affect anything simply because they’re so small compared to the rest of the population. This is in the same sense that only a minority of the population are severely immunocompromised to the point where Covid is still a threat, and the lack of masking and other safety precautions actually makes their lives significantly worse but because they’re so small their voices literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

That is to say I don’t attribute the lack of irl effect to social media but due to demographic size. There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.

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

#532
post #431

I'd be interested in hearing the most credible/reputable sources speaking out in favor of these changes. I've exclusively seen commentators dunking on this (rightfully so), across the political spectrum. To be clear: I'm wondering if we can find specific people speaking up for this, not an analysis of whose side of the culture war is most culpable for it.

I'm neither credible nor reputable, but I'm in favor of a weak version of this. When reading older books to my young child, I replace language that suggests that women are supposed to stay at home and men are supposed to go to work. One day soon he'll be able to read, and at that point I'll wish that books that were a product of their time would have been updated for the current time, so that he could just read the b…

Right I really don't get why people are so offended by these changes

If a work of fiction is changed to not imply women are meant to stay at home and men are meant to go to work, doesn't that show that, to those offended, on some level those implications are core to what makes that work that work?

None of these changes drastically affect the storylines, character arcs, unique characteristics, etc of the stories. If the a book saying the N word despite it not being central to the story is so important to you then it doesn't seem like you care about the book so much as you care about saying the N word

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In current American English, “female” has shifted to usually being an adjective, woman is a noun. Referring to people by noun-ing one of the adjectives that describes them is something considered reductive by a chunk of the population. If someone is a fan of “female” as a noun: I’m not going to change your mind. I get that changing language is annoying sometimes. I’m pointing out that “female” as a noun does bother s…

As a native English speaker, I find it hard to keep up and understand everything that’s now been deemed inappropriate. I can’t imagine how a non native would understand. Seems like there is an effort to intentionally keep making it more complex to show who really keeps up with twitter the most.

> I can’t imagine how a non native would understand.

I don't understand it. Respectfully, I also find it mildly amusing.

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

#534
Unrelated. There's an account by Dahl himself on how he goes about writing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQkz_X1Rg60

Sounds like he had 'deep work' figured out before it was a thing.

Reminds of Linus famously coding in an empty room in his dressing gown.

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

#535
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

HN loves bringing up Orwell in contexts that are not comparable. This is bad, but not in an Orwellian way.

How is rewriting old texts to make them align with modern politics not Orwellian?

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

#536
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm neither credible nor reputable, but I'm in favor of a weak version of this. When reading older books to my young child, I replace language that suggests that women are supposed to stay at home and men are supposed to go to work. One day soon he'll be able to read, and at that point I'll wish that books that were a product of their time would have been updated for the current time, so that he could just read the b…

Do you think the best way to address slavery is to erase all the records and pretend it didn’t happen?

Academics and historians studying this will look at the original language of course. The publisher goes to great lengths to make available all the changes made and is very transparent about them. Obviously most people aren't reading children's books to their kids to teach them history though

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roald Dahl personally killed Nazis as a fighter pilot. Go look it up.

He had four or five confirmed kills with no indication that the German pilots of the Junkers Ju 88s over Greece were Nazis. He also killed at least one Vichy French Air Force pilot .. again there's no indication whether that pilot (or pilots) were Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl#Fighter_pilot

This is just a weird, though pretty common nitpick, but I'll bite. The pilots he downed were actively fighting for a nazi state. They might have not been nazis themselves, but they were still fighting to spread nazi ideology. It wouldn't matter even if literally no german pilots were actually ideologically nazis, if they were still flying planes and combat missions in hopes of a victory for their side (nazi germany).

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

#538
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…

At least "bad" wasn't changed to "doubleplusungood", but it feels like that's not far away at this rate.

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

#540

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…

extremely well written.
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