Our language continues to shrink.
Liberalism is pure, unadulterated evil.
Next, digital editing of Richard Pryor albums.
Ironically, the very first person to say, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” was Mark Twain.
He also said: “The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.”
Mein Kampf is a hate-filled, anti-Semitic book. Are we going to cut out the anti-Jewish passages before publishing it in the future? Or are we simply going to ban it?
This publisher doesn’t have exclusive rights to the Twain works.
They might sell some to schools and Libraries. The umpteen million copies that exist in the market place aren’t going away anytime soon.
“African-American Jim” ?
So I guess this means that all black people will quit using that word too?
If you don’t like the history and learn from it just rewrite it. Thats how things are done now.
Nothing is real. Reminds me of a movie I saw last week.
This is unethical. It is time to buy up old copies and save them for presents or sell them later on ebay for profit.
“The original product is changed for the benefit of those who, for one reason or another, are not mature enough to handle it”
Can someone explain to the academic pedant that If you’re mature enough to actually read it, you’re mature enough to “handle” it?
For crying out loud. I read this book at eleven, and I knew you weren’t supposed to say the “n” word. My mom would have slapped me into the middle of next week.
By the way, Huck calls the girl with the cleft palate, whom he really likes, a ‘harelip.’ Are they going to change that, too?
But that’s all irrelevant. Under the guise of keeping this book out of the hands of children, they manage to ban it for everyone, which is their real goal.
Liberal book burners. Finn was the most frequently challenged book in libraries in recent history, and it’s the leftists who are doing it, not conservatives, not Christians. Idiots. What better way to criticize racism than to use racism’s own terms? Finn immerses you in that society to let you see how wrong parts of it were.
This will be a diluted version that my kids will not read. My kids know what that word means, and what baggage it entails, and that will make Finn even more effective for them.
ML/NJ
The Ministry of Truth is alive and well.
Twain used the term “Nigger Jim” because that was his name. That, simply, is that.
Also, we tend to overlook Huck’s genuine moral quandary near the end of the book. He knew that helping Jim escape to freedom was right. But he also knew that Jim was property, and that he was aiding in theft of that property. Rather than choosing between a right and a wrong, Huck was aware that he was selecting from two wrongs — hence why he calls himself “damned.” I suspect that Twain was giving us an analogy for the Civil War itself.
At that historical time, the “n” word was used generally, not just regarding negroes.
I read historic fiction books by Terry C. Johnston, and he uses the term a lot, among whites only.
IIRC, the quote for the novel “1984” goes something like this:
“Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
BTW, I am vehemently opposed to altering the text in any standard edition of the author’s work. However, if it will encourage the reading of the novel by children who would otherwise not have it available, I think replacing the “N word” with slave in a special school edition (and in school editions only) is fine. Fine just as long as the reasoning for the changes in the text are clearly explained to the student reader both in class and in the text and all instances of the change are appropriately identified (italicized, footnoted, etc.).
Since we’ve all been mentally hogtied into using the phrase “n-word” even in the context of discussing why the word nigger has been airbrushed from works of literature, speaks volumes about the level of social control we’re willing to impose on ourselves.
Are the works of Langston Hughes on the chopping block, too?
Yes, indeed. Their position has the singular virtue of being correct.
I think he said, "Alan Gribben is a glass bowl."