When George Orwell wrote his famous novel 1984, he meant it as a warning and not an instruction manual:
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.
Among words deemed offensive are "ugly" and "fat" (why am I not surprised?), but also "female" and "men"
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”...
References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
I'm glad UK has obviously no other problems to deal with, like I don't know, the growing cost of living etc. I keep reading that they soon will turn into another India or Pakistan and at this point I'm like why should I even care? At least, these countries still know the difference between male and female and it's OK to be a man there. The British do it to themselves, too.
This is one of the reasons that our family (and several families we are in close community with) are diligently collecting books, and we buy them used rather than new for this very reason. Having a library of what used to be will be paramount in the next decade or so.
ReplyDeleteI agree, most of my books are second-hand, too! Plus, I prefer real paper books to e-books. I mean whatever will even be left of our generation when everything is in e-form? No letters, no diaries, nothing...
ReplyDelete