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The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn

eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."

3 of 1,073 comments (clear)

  1. better than Fox News by tekrat · · Score: -1, Troll

    Who would have changed the N-word to "Muslim".
    Or whatever moniker they've assigned to Obama this week.
    Maybe they'd have just changed it to "Democrat".

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
  2. Re:If you can't handle the n-word... by chispito · · Score: -1, Troll

    Chances are, if children are kept in bubbles and keep being told that 'bad' words are 'bad' because they are 'bad', they will never be able to handle any 'bad' words. I mean, really, if we just acknowledged that they were just strings of letters with meanings like any other word, this wouldn't even be a problem.

    Do you wake your four year old son up every morning and say "Good fucking morning, son. Would you like some fucking breakfast? Your mom is going to take you to fucking preschool."

    Of course you don't. Your child will have no idea what the word means, except that when he uses it around other people, he gets a reaction and what four year old doesn't want attention?

    Same thing with this. The kid will not understand why, only that when he calls people "nigger" he gets all sorts of attention.

    --
    The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
  3. Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Not sure how that could be better written!

    He could have avoided using the word "nigger."