Came for the n-word, stayed for the story. Those silly trains.
cowboydan@quokk.au 1 day ago
https://www.scribd.com/document/899239966/Henry-the-Green-Engine-1951-Scanned-by-ThatERTLGuy
Page 60. Published in 1950, and retracted in 1972 from my quick research.
OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world 1 day ago
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
That author was definitely a Diesel.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Bullet Train mention 🚆🚄🚩
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 22 hours ago
I was hoping someone would get it since I hadn’t seen it referenced yet
Chozo@fedia.io 1 day ago
Well done, Henry.
zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
well then, I assumed it was negros, I was wrong.
Triumph@fedia.io 1 day ago
p64 of the document, p60 of the book
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
For the lazy who don’t want to look it up
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WesternInfidels@feddit.online 1 day ago
It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.
I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children’s book if it were seen as at all offensive.
Words like “bugger” and “damn” used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they’re often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.
Scrollone@feddit.it 1 day ago
I mean… there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.
We’re viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn’t have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.
I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.
zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.
Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.
Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.
So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I mean it is from 1951. I’ve seen a lot worse by people who meant it.
It’s 4 years before Emmett Till was murdered for example.
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I wonder if Carlin ever tried sneaking that past the censors.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. Black people aren’t charcoal black.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 1 day ago
According to old-timey racists, they are.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
In the 1950s … to average white people who might have never seen a black person before … they would imagine this
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Midnight1938@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that’s how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I’d seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).
My friend is also charcoal black, so that’s definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).
rumba@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.
Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca 1 day ago
I’m just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn’t as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of “black” that maybe wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years ago.
Just a random thought
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Outdated but not offensive, a lot better than it could have been.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I’m too lazy even for this. I need a red circle and perhaps some Family Guy to get my attention.
Oka@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Last word