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• WesternInfidels@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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    • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Fag still is a term for a cigarette…

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      • starik@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Yeah, but only in old-timey countries, like England.

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      • bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I had always heard that it originally meant a stick to be used for kindling and was adapted to smoking once the tobacco trade was a thing. Probably complete horseshit because no internet when I was a kid, but I never bothered to look it up.

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    • gerryflap@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Exactly. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, and it takes some getting used to that “queer” is used in a completely different way than nowadays.

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      • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Queer is a strange one for me, growing up it was a straight up offensive slur for gay people but now the LGBTQ community has embraced it hard enough to give it its own letter.

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      • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I must be old, since the original meaning is still what comes to mind first when I hear it in a non-LGBTQ context.

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      • daggermoon@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        This is from South Africa in the year 2000. It just means unusual in this context.

        https://www.songlyrics.com/saron-gas/beer-lyrics/

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    • DamienGramatacus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Weren’t idiot, moron and imbecile medical terms specifically used by white scientists to describe black people back in the good old eugenics days of the 1920’s America? Language changes sure but it often has very racist roots.

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I’ve never heard anything about it having a racial component.

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    • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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    • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Buggery used to be a crime, now it’s a gay way to spend an afternoon

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      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I wonder if straight people were ever convicted of buggery with he opposite sex? I wouldn’t be surprised if “buggery” existed solely to persecute homosexuals back then.

        (I was gonna say “non-straight” or “queer” but “homosexuals” read in 30’s English accent sounded funnier to me in my head)

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Nice one.

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    • SaraTonin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Enid Blyton used it a surprising amount. But she was also considered old-fashioned and racist by critics at the time, so…

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    • fartographer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      “Bah humbug,” was that era’s equivalent of Scrooge wandering around saying, “whatever, bullshit.”

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  • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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    • zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.

      until 1985!

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  • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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  • zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.

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    • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It was called out for being offensive even in that time by fellow English.

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  • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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  • Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I wonder if Carlin ever tried sneaking that past the censors.

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    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      George Carlin was voicing Mr Conductor in the American dubs in the 1990s, so a solid 20 years after the retraction

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    • HikingVet@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I don’t remember him really weighing in on that word. And if I’m not mistaken he was friends with Richard Pryor.

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      • zjti8eit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        It was NOT one of his 7 words you can’t say on T.V.

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• Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. Black people aren’t charcoal black.

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  • OwOarchist@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Black people aren’t charcoal black.

    According to old-timey racists, they are.

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    • ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Exactly … according to old-timey racists in the 1950s … this is what they imagined about black people

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I mean I’m terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You’d think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.

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      • jaybone@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        You mean Halle Berry?

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  • ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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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    • arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I can promise you that the vast majority of white Americans had seen a black person in the 1950s.

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      • f314@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        This is a British book, though

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      • Atomic@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I know it’s difficult to grasp the idea that the world is larger than just the US. But you’ll juat have to try.

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  • Midnight1938@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?

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    • Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Alright, that’s actually pretty funny.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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).

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  • Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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

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  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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• ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Outdated but not offensive, a lot better than it could have been.

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I’m too lazy even for this. I need a red circle and perhaps some Family Guy to get my attention.

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  • Oka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Last word

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    • psx_crab@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Ahh yes, the famous last word.

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