A little more creeping censorship: the T word

[dianeduane]

Here, try this on for size.

Random House Children's Books has agreed to remove a four-letter swearword from a popular book by Dame Jacqueline Wilson after complaints from Anne Dixon, who insists she is standing up for values of common decency.

The 55-year-old said she was horrified when she came across the expletive in the best-selling book My Sister Jodie – a gift for her nine-year-old great-niece, Eve Coulson.

"I got to the page where reference was made to a 'toffee-nosed twit'," she said.

"On the next page the word changed….”

To another word different by a single vowel: a word normally used for a part of the female anatomy. (No indication is given in the article about how the context might have changed.) The lady, outraged, emailed the author for an explanation of “how to explain this” to her great-niece, and having heard nothing back, complained to Asda (where she’d bought the book).

Apparently this got back to Random House, provoking this response:

A spokesman for Random House Children's Books said: "In the context of the character, we felt it was used in a way that accurately portrayed how children like Jodie would speak to each other.

"The book is aimed at children aged ten and over, and we felt it was acceptable for that age range.

"However, in light of this response we have decided to amend the word when we reprint the book."

What particularly interests me here is the language. Just who exactly is “we”? Was the author included in this decision? (She’d better have been. And if she was, and has decided to keep mum about it, that’s her business.)

…Let me be clear about this. I’m not wild about the use of intimate-body-part-based slang in general, because it’s so often used pejoratively, in a my-gender-or-orientation-is-better-than-yours way. I don’t use it in my own work except when writing for adults, and then judiciously. But that’s my personal preference. What Dame Jacqueline feels is apropos for a given age is up to her. (And as a side issue, my guess is that most nine-year-olds in the UK know the word in question perfectly well, having heard it on the playground — and words a whole lot rougher — since they were in first form.) But when a single complaint from a member of the public can cause editorial changes like this… then somewhere, something is broken.

…Just a pre-caffeine thought.

Tags: censorship, Jacqueline+Wilson, children's+books, Random+House

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

WTF? A complaint by one person? Oh, this is the same publisher as the last one.

I wonder how many of their books we could keep them revising because of complaints. They now have a precedent that they act on complaints from just one person, so we could keep them so busy revising their books from single complaints that they have no time to actually release books and go out of business.

(You don't have any of your books published by them, do you?)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, no.

[icanreadyourmnd.livejournal.com]

Are the early Wizard Dell/Delacorte books reverted? (I worked there once upon a time)

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

But even Browning used the word! In a poem!

...as it happens, just yesterday I was reading this article on Language Log about the word that Browning thought referred to a part of a nun's habit...

(At the end of the article there's a reference to a further post with more detailed explanations, too.)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! When I was a kid (the sort of age RH are assuming reads that book) I thought it was a sort of bird (possibly confusing it with 'twit' and hence 'tit', I knew the latter was a bird long before I was aware of other meanings).

I suspect that there are many other children who also use the word as a general insult without knowing its meaning, just as few people actually think of the origins of 'bloody' and 'berk'. In fact I've known quite a few adults who when asked to not use the word have thought that it just meant "stupid person".

(It could be argued that if you know enough to be offended by the meaning then you are already 'corrupted'...)

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Hmm... *sends off proposal to rename our new "cat nun" cornet...

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Ohh, I should have thought of you! ...I guess I assumed that everybody in the English-speaking world except me already knew this line of the poem very well, and I would end up just looking silly...

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

It looks to me one with the overblown reaction to imaginary risks - cut down the horse chestnut trees because someone might injure themselves playing conkers and the council might be sued - or something.

It looks to me like a culture of fear. The ppossible consequence is so scary that excessive, and sometimes irrelevant, actions are taken to avoid it.

[wolfette]

it's a common word in the UK, as you well know - but most kids would think it was a combination of "twit" and "prat".

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Interesting, do you pronounce it with a hard 'a' as in 'cat'? Dahn Sahf where I am I've always heard it with an 'o' sound as in 'hot' (or as the 'a' in southern English 'wander'), so wouldn't associate it with 'prat' except by spelling.

[wolfette]

yep, rhymes with "cat" for us.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

That's how I parsed it when I came across it (not as a child though, I only learned English later). It was a good while before someone told me its original/actual meaning.

[wolfette]

there's actually a village in Orkney called "Twatt" :-)

It also seems to be a not-uncommon surname up there.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I know a place called "Pratt's Bottom" (near Orpington in Kent), and Pratt isn't an unknown surname around here, I've known a couple of people with it. I do feel sorry for the kids, though. "You're a prat!" "I know, so's my father..."

[serenya-loreden.livejournal.com]

As a (very adult) resident of the US, I was quite unclear on the meaning, as it does indeed sound rather like twit and prat. I did eventually pick up on it, but to me it is so obscure I cannot get offended by it (and I admit I would be offended by the use of, say the 'c' equivalent, because it is so very pejorative in its use)

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

But - in a Jacquie Wilson book? How ridiculous! Wilson is so deliberately conscious of everything she does. (I actually really admire her ability to get fairly cynical children onside and firmly believe that her writing gives children agency - I've been a bit old for her for a few years now but I remember her fondly - and part of that is her willingness to use literally age-appropriate words and behaviours, which I think is pretty transparent to any critical reader.)

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. I wonder if it wasn't actually a typo, and they're doing this in order to spare themselves embarrassment and legal liability?

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

The parallel is somewhat weak, but in my own field (software development) it's actually pretty common to make an editorial change on the basis of a single complaint. And I don't necessarily even mean bugs, where the software is broken and you just hadn't noticed, but actual 'editorial' changes - things like 'this is very confusing; I think you used the wrong word here'. For every comment like that we get we know there were probably dozens or hundreds of people who felt similarly and didn't bother to write in, so one comment is enough to justify looking at the issue. Not enough to /force/ changing it, but enough to take 5 or 10 minutes to consider it. Sometimes, after giving it a bit of thought, it turns out they have a point.

The case in point here is bad because it should be the author considering the change, not the publisher, and because the complaint was probably silly to begin with. And there's a difference between the roles of feedback in artistic and 'functional' endeavors. But all the same, I don't think one should ignore a comment on the basis of only receiving it once. Ignore it on its merits, instead :)

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

Any publisher who would do such a thing is a twit.

[lunalovegoddess.livejournal.com]

A valid thought, though. It's not about what the word is, exactly, but about balancing censorship and discretion.

Example:
As a fledgling writer, I try to limit the use of "spicy language", but if it's in character for someone to curse, I'll pepper their comments as necessary... or else cut the character off as they start to say the word. Teens and adults will know what comes next, as would some younger children.
Just as I would limit the amount of "on-screen" sex. A slip of the tongue here, a few coy glances, blushes the next morning... leave it to the reader's imagination.

I came across a word the other day, a synonym, actually... I thought it meant a Hawaiian flower, as did my daughter. When I looked up the meaning, I had to explain to her that it also was Jamaican slang for private parts, and that was why I didn't feel it was appropriate for her to wear a perfume with a name like "Voodoo Punani". When she's in college, perhaps, but not as a young teen.

In our house, we limit the use of profanity, but if "sonuvabitch!" or "shit" slips out once in a while, the kids are not going to be punished. They've heard a lot worse from me, but they understand that it's to be used sparingly. The rule is that you never use those words at school or around company because it's not polite and shows a lack of imagination. I challenge them, instead, to come up with more creative taunts and actually find out what the word they are using means. It's not unusual to hear Shakespearean insults in our house, or phrases like, "Sugarplums and fairybums" or "Sweet Bastet!" My favorite: "Lord Nelson's trousers!"

~getting off-topic again~
Luna

[tenaya-owlcat.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think we need to stop dumbing down to our kids. I'm sure her great niece has heard MUCH worse, probably from other kids at school, maybe even from her own parents. And you can't exactly convince people to put duct-tape across the offender's mouths, now can you?

[slimequeen.livejournal.com]

... I didn't even learn the offensive word in question until I was about 20, but I lived a very sheltered life as far as profanity and crude slang goes.

A British book did almost get me in trouble when I was 13. On the way home from church (yes, really) I was reading the Victorian book "The Little White Horse" and came across the word ejaculate and asked my mom and grandma what it meant. They shared a look of horror and asked me to read the sentence. It was quite innocent, just used as a variation of "said," but I was mortified to find it had a more modern meaning.

[the-10thdoctor.livejournal.com]

Now if I was that publisher? I totally would have changed the word....to something even worse. ;)

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

*much cognitive dissonance between your username and userpic*

[the-10thdoctor.livejournal.com]

I want Saxon for VP ;)

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

I just wrote to childrenseditorial@randomhouse.co.uk as the father of a 10-year-old girl asking them not to punish the rest of us because 3 people are incapable of coming up with explanations for their kids.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Without context it is difficult to say whether it was an initial editorial error in the first place.
Unfortunately with computerised proof reading and spell checking such "typos" have become rife in the publishing industry.

So far the most hilarious one I've come across was in a Romance novel where the hero for half a page becomes "her", which wouldn't be so bad but it was leading up to a passionate kiss.

[(Anonymous)]

Without context it is difficult to say whether it was an initial editorial error in the first place.

I blogged about this here (http://segalbooks.blogspot.com/2008/08/literary-twttery.html) (rude word warning). From the context, it's clearly not an error: Jed calls Harley "a toffee-nosed twit" sotto voce, and Jodie then escalates the situation, having evidently misheard, by telling Harley (who didn't catch Jed's remark) that Jed had called him a "toffee-nosed tw*t".

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Ah in which case it had a valid reason to be in there and surely its going to muck up the story itself then if they change it!