On Bad Words
Feb. 20th, 2023 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eyelessgameSo I hear they're publishing new editions of Roald Dahl's books and rewording them to remove the epithets kids would throw around like "fat" and "ugly".
I have at least four opinions about this. I'm going to meander.
On the one hand. We do this ALL THE FRICKING TIME. There's things you don't publish. There's things you change because you don't think your audience would want them to be there. There's things you leave out because your tired af of getting letters complaining about them. The first Shakespeare book I read was a school textbook my mom had used, and it censored some of the dirty jokes that 1930s America was likely to understand. I'm pretty sure the version of Treasure Island I read left out the subplot of Long John Silver's black lover - whether because (gasp) interracial love (a typical sentiment of, say, the 1950s) or because she's referred to throughout with the term (gasp) customary for a black woman in 19th century English (a typical sentiment of, say, the 1990s), I don't know; it might have been either.
Which kind of leads into the second point. There's plenty that we censor right now - and that we *agree* we should censor. They don't even try to read Huckleberry Finn anymore in schools, and it's obvious why, even though the shocking offensiveness of Jim's name was the *point* - exactly the same as the same word's use throughout Blazing Saddles, it's shining a bright light on the casual racism it's portraying.
There's a *reason* we don't use language like that anymore, though. Words have connotations. The point of politically correct speech is to avoid connotations that were invisibly excluding, demeaning, hurting people.
But this flows back to another point, too - we can't fix society by fixing words. What we want is a society where such words aren't used *because everyone understands the offense the word would give and chooses not to,* not because we're bludgeoning people into thinking them but not saying them. The problem isn't the words themselves, it's the problems that the words reinforce, the fact that they not only exclude people who are too often made victims already, but also reinforce license to those who so often use such words as part of the abuse they deliver.
Words, or *portrayals*, because after all, both are communication, both are part of storytelling, which is the third hand. We look at the "well-meaning" censorship of other eras and sometimes we laugh at the foolishness... and maybe we shouldn't. They censor genitals on TV and everyone considers that normal, but they censored Jeannie's navel and Elvis' hips and this was considered "prudish". But then a few years later, we made the movie "Lolita", which would be not just offensive but *illegal* to make today and everyone who isn't a total creep *agrees that this is as it should be*. Think about that.
And on the fourth hand, we're talking about legitimate cultural values and legitimate cultural changes, and they profoundly change what we accept and enjoy. When I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I found it unreadable, and when I tried to read it to my children they were immediately bored, because the culture and language had moved on from this book - it was foreign, unfamiliar, and lacked enough common experience that my children (this was fifteen years ago or so) simply didn't have any interest in it...
...and that point is that culture moves on. There's lots, it's said, of very good literature being put out there all the time; certainly there are tons of writers and tons of books published. Maybe the right answer isn't either to keep or to remove Roald Dahl's "fat" and "ugly" language, maybe the right answer is simply to move on from Roald Dahl.
Every author is a product of their time - and while sometimes that's a justification or an excuse or a context, sometimes it also means that their work ceases to be *interesting to read* anymore.
And on the almost final hand... there was a mediocre book I read years ago with an immortal character; set in the present day, it was framed as an interview with him (and it was not written by Ann Rice, but thematically you're very close); this immortal being chose, for most of his entertainment, diversions from a century or more ago. When asked whether he was out of step with the modern world, he denied it, and instead invoked Sturgeon's Law: almost everything produced in media and entertainment (music, reading, plays, movies, etc.) is mostly crap, and very little is truly worthwhile; he preferred to sit back and let the culture sort this out, since it would preserve and maintain those bits that were important; and then he would enjoy what endured. He had, after all, no time to waste on inferior entertainment. (The interviewer considered this arrogant, and may have been right.) But the point is, yes, every piece of art is a product of its time, but some works transcend it, and we can't eliminate every old book just because it includes things we don't like to hear today.
But Roald Dahl? He was good, but there's lots of good children's books. Don't censor his work. Put it in the infinite-and-growing "historical interest" section of our virtual library, and read your children something else.
And on the final hand. There's this little cultural conservative, or meta-conservative, who lives in my hind brain and now and then wakes up, hocks a brown loogie, mutters about "kids today," and falls back to sleep. And what he would say is the same thing Buckaroo Banzai said during brain surgery, which is the idealization of conservative thought: "Don't tug on that; you don't know what it's attached to." The reason your society needs conservatives is because every time you change something, you need people to go "Wait a minute, think about what you're giving up here", and once in a while they're right.
I have at least four opinions about this. I'm going to meander.
On the one hand. We do this ALL THE FRICKING TIME. There's things you don't publish. There's things you change because you don't think your audience would want them to be there. There's things you leave out because your tired af of getting letters complaining about them. The first Shakespeare book I read was a school textbook my mom had used, and it censored some of the dirty jokes that 1930s America was likely to understand. I'm pretty sure the version of Treasure Island I read left out the subplot of Long John Silver's black lover - whether because (gasp) interracial love (a typical sentiment of, say, the 1950s) or because she's referred to throughout with the term (gasp) customary for a black woman in 19th century English (a typical sentiment of, say, the 1990s), I don't know; it might have been either.
Which kind of leads into the second point. There's plenty that we censor right now - and that we *agree* we should censor. They don't even try to read Huckleberry Finn anymore in schools, and it's obvious why, even though the shocking offensiveness of Jim's name was the *point* - exactly the same as the same word's use throughout Blazing Saddles, it's shining a bright light on the casual racism it's portraying.
There's a *reason* we don't use language like that anymore, though. Words have connotations. The point of politically correct speech is to avoid connotations that were invisibly excluding, demeaning, hurting people.
But this flows back to another point, too - we can't fix society by fixing words. What we want is a society where such words aren't used *because everyone understands the offense the word would give and chooses not to,* not because we're bludgeoning people into thinking them but not saying them. The problem isn't the words themselves, it's the problems that the words reinforce, the fact that they not only exclude people who are too often made victims already, but also reinforce license to those who so often use such words as part of the abuse they deliver.
Words, or *portrayals*, because after all, both are communication, both are part of storytelling, which is the third hand. We look at the "well-meaning" censorship of other eras and sometimes we laugh at the foolishness... and maybe we shouldn't. They censor genitals on TV and everyone considers that normal, but they censored Jeannie's navel and Elvis' hips and this was considered "prudish". But then a few years later, we made the movie "Lolita", which would be not just offensive but *illegal* to make today and everyone who isn't a total creep *agrees that this is as it should be*. Think about that.
And on the fourth hand, we're talking about legitimate cultural values and legitimate cultural changes, and they profoundly change what we accept and enjoy. When I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I found it unreadable, and when I tried to read it to my children they were immediately bored, because the culture and language had moved on from this book - it was foreign, unfamiliar, and lacked enough common experience that my children (this was fifteen years ago or so) simply didn't have any interest in it...
...and that point is that culture moves on. There's lots, it's said, of very good literature being put out there all the time; certainly there are tons of writers and tons of books published. Maybe the right answer isn't either to keep or to remove Roald Dahl's "fat" and "ugly" language, maybe the right answer is simply to move on from Roald Dahl.
Every author is a product of their time - and while sometimes that's a justification or an excuse or a context, sometimes it also means that their work ceases to be *interesting to read* anymore.
And on the almost final hand... there was a mediocre book I read years ago with an immortal character; set in the present day, it was framed as an interview with him (and it was not written by Ann Rice, but thematically you're very close); this immortal being chose, for most of his entertainment, diversions from a century or more ago. When asked whether he was out of step with the modern world, he denied it, and instead invoked Sturgeon's Law: almost everything produced in media and entertainment (music, reading, plays, movies, etc.) is mostly crap, and very little is truly worthwhile; he preferred to sit back and let the culture sort this out, since it would preserve and maintain those bits that were important; and then he would enjoy what endured. He had, after all, no time to waste on inferior entertainment. (The interviewer considered this arrogant, and may have been right.) But the point is, yes, every piece of art is a product of its time, but some works transcend it, and we can't eliminate every old book just because it includes things we don't like to hear today.
But Roald Dahl? He was good, but there's lots of good children's books. Don't censor his work. Put it in the infinite-and-growing "historical interest" section of our virtual library, and read your children something else.
And on the final hand. There's this little cultural conservative, or meta-conservative, who lives in my hind brain and now and then wakes up, hocks a brown loogie, mutters about "kids today," and falls back to sleep. And what he would say is the same thing Buckaroo Banzai said during brain surgery, which is the idealization of conservative thought: "Don't tug on that; you don't know what it's attached to." The reason your society needs conservatives is because every time you change something, you need people to go "Wait a minute, think about what you're giving up here", and once in a while they're right.
