Racial epithet makes news

[Jonathan Lighter]

Surely someone has criticized even the changed version. Doesn't it mean that
Chinese people only and always eat with "sticks"?  And by mentioning it ("To
*think* that I saw it on *Mulberry* Street!") isn't the
narrator telling children that it's weird?

JL

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <
bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Racial epithet makes news
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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.
>
>  ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org