Racial epithet makes news

[Benjamin Zimmer]

And then there's Dr Seuss's _And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry
Street_ (1937), which originally had "a Chinaman who eats with
sticks," changed to "a Chinese man..." in the late '70s.


On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 2:40 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
> The change in title of Agatha Christie's novel reminds me of the following:
> Some of you will recall the series of "fairy tale" books edited in the late 19th C by
> Andrew Lang.  There were a dozen or so, all with a color in the title: The Blue Fairy
>  Book, &c.  In the 1960s or 70s the Dover company reprinted them all, by
> photooffset from copies of the originals.   I bought them all, for my children.
> In the 80s I read a review of several of these reprints in one of the bibliographical
>  journals -- of all places.  But because it was in a bibliographical journal, the
> reviewer noticed and commented on the fact that in one of the tales, the hero,
> seeking a treasure in gold, or maybe a maiden, was opposed by a guard of horrid
> ogres.  In the original edition, the guard had been horrid negroes.  Someone at
> Dover had spotted this, had cut out the word "negroes", cut it into its individual
> letters, got rid of the "n" and one "e" and rearranged the remaining letters to make
> "ogres", while adjusting the spacing of the letters to conceal the fact that "ogres"
> was 2 letters shorter than the word replaced.
>
> This review would have been in either PBSA (Papers of the Bibliographic Society
> of America) or The Library (the English equivalent).
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton3 at VIRGINMEDIA.COM>
>
> > Well, there's her novel which started life with the title (in 1939) as
> > _Ten
> > Little Niggers_ before being ameliorated to _Ten Little Indians_
> > (sic!) and
> > ending as, _And Then There Were None_.
> >
> > Again, the context isn't entirely straightforward -- the original title
> > draws on a counting rhyme (UK only?), and while offensive in the UK,
> > "nigger" has (or had) a different semantic spread to that in US English,
> > referring to *any non-white figure, rather than specifically African
> > American or West Indian.
> >
> > Possibly marginally related, the English children's author Enid Blyton
> > toned
> > down the language of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus tales about Brer
> > Rabbit and Brer Fox for an English audience.

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