The news about changing language in Roald Dahl’s work is just the latest skirmish in the bizarre battle to censor books, writes Moreen Simpson.
Has the world gone skite?
Every week, new so-called “woke” sharnie dubs emerge to challenge us to offend a’body from Cove to Clatt. Now it’s author Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, carrying out a major disinfection of his best-selling children’s work. Ootski diabolic words like fat, ugly and black (as in the colour of a tractor, nae kiddin’) lest the little-darling readers throw an aghast hairy canary.
It’s the latest skirmish in the bizarre battle to censor books to “protect young people from cultural, ethical and gender stereotypes”, according to the Dahl-detectives, word police dumbing and dulling-down prose until its original magic is lost.
Sad to say, my alma mater, Aberdeen University, has not been taking literary purging lyin’ doon. Last month, I near tiddled masellie (apologies to continent, innocent craiters) when I discovered it had slapped “trigger warnings” on various famous works, like JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, to alert their English literature scholars to “odd perspectives on gender” which might be “emotionally challenging”. Have ye ever lugged such guff? Surely those undergrads have survived the hugely greater emotional ordeal of a King Street student party?
To add insult to injury, the heart-stopping Railway Children and oor very ain Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s wondrous Sunset Song are also included among texts students might find distressing because of “racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, violence”. Fit aboot daunting Doricism?
The uni’s latest foray into the delights of detoxification is a programme to “decolonise” the curriculum across the campus. OK, so there needs to be more ethnic minority representation, but the PR justification is gobbledygook. “Because all disciplines taught and researched at all British universities have been historically influenced by Eurocentric colonialism and its cultural concept of race.” As Manuel would say: “Que?”
As I wage war on academics, I have to ‘fess up my mum may have been a Pioneer Purger. While sitting my Honours English in 1970, I’d take the question papers home and she – left school at 14, read only magazines and newspapers, never a book – would sit and study them in detail, nodding knowingly. As if she was au fait with all the reasons for Hamlet’s procrastination.
Her demeanour changed the day I brought home the American literature paper, which included an extract from a book for us to analyse. As she read, she became increasingly outraged. Then the explosion: “They shouldnae be gettin’ ye tae read filth like this! Far did they find it? Dirty Willie’s book shop on the Boulie?”
The passage was the admittedly shocking brothel scene from Catch 22. But little did she know the untold harm she had done to four-year-old Mo when she read her Peter Pan.
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press & Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
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