Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
Full disclosure:
I recently uploaded The Queen of Hearts (a collection of novels written in the 1850s) by Wilkie Collins to the MR library. As well as changing 'gayety' to 'gaiety' and 'gayly' to 'gaily' I also changed 'gay' to 'light-hearted'. I did this because the English language has changed in the last 150 odd years. In our day 'a gay man' would almost certainly be read as 'a homosexual man,' and this is simply not what Collins meant - he would have used a different term if he had dared to mention a character's sexual orientation at all. I did add a note to the posting that I had updated spelling and hyphenation - I also changed 'to-day' to 'today' for example.
How does that grab you?
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I think that it's a horrible violation of the author's work and a disservice to readers. How is it up to you to decide what Collins meant? Yes, the language has changed, but Collins had plenty of words to choose from when he wrote what he wrote--including "light-hearted"--and he rejected them in favor of "gay." But you just overrode his choice.
I don't know what the context was, but if it wasn't clear enough how Collins was using the word, and you felt an overpowering need to explain, why not simply add an annotation of some sort when the word appeared?
As far as changing spelling, why? Is there any chance of confusion? How could a reader not get that "to-day" means "today"?
This is a perfect example of how people decide on their own to "improve" a book. You say "light-hearted," another uploader might decide "gay" means "happy," and another might decide to change it to "carefree," etc.
Why not change "gayly" to "light-heartedly" rather than simply changing the spelling? Mightn't some poor benighted reader think "gayly" also referred to sexual orientation, even if you spell it "gaily"?
I think it's outrageous.