Item — HN Reader

I think this is a bit too much of a strawman for an argument that's in line with what's actually discussed in the linked article. Especially when talking about a guy who directed Schindler's List.

> Spielberg was also asked about the controversial re-editing of Roald Dahl’s work which has included changing words like “fat” to “enormous” and “ugly and beastly” to just “beastly”.

> Initially he joked that “Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” before adding “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”

Roald Rahdl books were a big part of what I remember reading as a child. The words "fat" and "ugly" are absolutely grotesque, but also part of the palette he used to draw his worlds as he wanted people to see them. I think parents have the responsibility to have a proper conversation about the questions their children might have about the some of stuff those books bring up, or make the decision to not read them until the child is of a certain age. At least from my point of view, the central question would be that what is the proper age that a child is old enough to know about the existence of the words "fat" and "ugly".

4 comments

'Fat' and 'ugly' are not grotesque words, they are unkind. If you want grotesque, look up 'hassan's rumpus room' from Naked Lunch. Should be around page 60 or so.

Do you think that a child won't know that "enormous" means "fat"? Or that "beastly" just means "ugly"?

Euphemism treadmill is driven by people who believe in a fairly strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that the thoughts we have are bounded by the words we have. They think that the negative connotations of fatness are at least in part derived from the word "fat" itself and could therefore be at least partially erased by getting rid of that word and replacing it with another.

But even if we erased every single word for fatness from the minds of everybody in existence all in an instant, new words for fatness would be invented the very next instant when people around the world see fatness, can't find a word for it, and invent a new one. Words are tools for conveying understanding. Humans are tool-creating apes; when we need a tool, we make a tool. Remove a slur from people's vocabulary and people will invent a new one.

When I was young, my school had a program for retarded kids, the kids with profound mental disabilities. We also called each other retarded as a mild insult to impugn our friends' intelligence. The teachers and parents hated this, they banned the word retarded and renamed the class for the retarded kids to "Special Education". Anybody caught saying "retarded" would be scolded very severely and denied recess/etc. So what did we do? We started using "special", "special education" and "sped" as insults equivalent to retarded. You can't erase concepts by erasing words, least of all concepts that are so readily observable and self-evidently negative as the state of being mentally retarded or fat. Need a tool, make a tool.

Noa words are an ancient phenomena. Quite soon the Noa word is the new 'bad luck' word and the cycle has to repeat. E.g. "bear".

Probably does. Although the words are definitely not equivalent. I'm not advocating any sort of age limit on Roald Dahl books, pretty much the opposite.

Although the words are definitely not equivalent

Give it a generation of children growing up with the new euphemisms as standard terminology. Then they will be equivalent.

The semantic treadmill strikes again

Grotesque is an ugly word and more enormous than it needs to be at that.

I also think the Dahl books shouldn't have been altered, but everything I've read about that suggests it was the publisher's decision, not government-mandated censorship. The issue here is more about authors' right and IP ownership.

Who said anything about the government? In the article, Spielberg laments his own decision to censor the guns in ET. It was his decision to alter his own movie, not government-imposed. The article isn't about government-imposed censorship specifically, it's Spielberg lamenting censorship generally.

inb4 "it's not real censorship unless the government does it"

I think the word censorship really has to relate to government action - if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.

Hey no fair, I said inb4

Anyway, you're wrong and I think you know it because you said "government-mandated censorship." The first two words clarify the third. This wouldn't be necessary if the third truly implied the first two.

Have you ever heard of the Hays Code? It's quite infamous, you probably have; it was a system of self-imposed censorship from Hollywood to ban scandalous content from movies, such as people kissing or husbands and wives only having a single bed in their bedroom (oh the implications!) But the point is this censorship was self-imposed, there was no act of congress requiring it. The claim that true censorship must come from the government is simply wrong.

> if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.

It doesn't lose all meaning. It loses only the very narrow meaning you wish to impose (probably because it's an ugly word and you don't want to think yourself capable of censoring.)

The Hays Code and the Comic Code were both arguably an industry self-censoring "somewhat" (for whatever value of that you want) so as to side-step government legislation.