Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
I am horrified at the idea of anyone deciding to try to sanitize language to meet current standards of political correctness.
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I have two different versions of Josephine Tey's 1929 novel "The Man in the Queue". The original 1929 text uses the word "dago" to refer to one of the main characters in the book. I have a 1960s edition of the same book in which "dago" has been changed to "Levantine". Does this really horrify you? I think of it as the job of an editor to make this type of change as a result of language changing. In the 1920s it was acceptable (in Britain) to refer to a person of Mediterranean appearance as a "dago"; by the 1960s it was not.
It's an editor's
job to maximise the commercial potential of a book, not to regard a writer's words as "holy writ that must not be changed". Pretty much every book needs editing before publishing, and if it stays in print for decades, it may well need re-editing to account for societal changes. That's not "horrifying"; it's the editor's job.