by Jonathan Turley at Jonathan Turley News
Where are the Oompa Loompas when you need them. Willy Wonka’s helpers asked “who do you blame when your kid is a brat? Pampered and spoiled like a Siamese cat?” The same question could be asked about publishers after Puffin Books hired sensitivity readers to “update” portions of Roald Dahl’s classic books. The changes include dropping references to Augustus Gloop being “fat.” Yet, unlike the Oompa Loompas, who found sanctuary “from hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles,” there is no safe place from woke whangdoodles today.
While European publishers have refused to rewrite Dahl’s classics, Puffin Books believes that it is perfectly acceptable to change books after an author has died. Puffin simply could not abide references to things like the weight of Gloop. So they changed “fat” to “enormous.” (It is not clear what Puffin Books will do with Walter Tevis’ character “Minnesota Fats” in The Hustler. “Minnesota Enormous” just doesn’t quite have that same authentic gritty quality in a pool hall drama).
WARNING THE FOLLOWING VIDEO SHOWS OOMPA LOOMPAS REFERENCING A WORD DEPICTING A BODY SHAPE:
French publishing house Gallimard told The Telegraph that it will not rewrite such works and the revisions “only concern Britain.”
Yet, many believe that it is perfectly acceptable to rewrite the work of great authors. We previously discussed how publishers rewrote portions of Twain classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because people found the original writing to be offensive.
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