[Prestidigitweeze]

Alex:

I take it you won't be creating an edition of the collected works of John Gay.

Others' point about not changing the wording of standing text is a crucial one, but they have made it several times already. Instead, I'd like to offer this:

Even the language of especially offensive texts must be preserved to show historical and/or artistic context.

Let's proceed by degrees from the significance of offensive ideas to that of offensive language.

We know that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fraudulent document of an imaginary attempt by imaginary Jewish people to dominate the world. But if someone tried to sanitize that text in the name of decency, then anyone who read it would not feel the full impact of its viciousness and so might not understand what it meant when Hitler claimed the book was a legitimate document, nor be as shocked that it was published and promoted by people as prominent as American industrialist Henry Ford. To omit language or passages from the book could potentially excuse proponents like Ford in readers' minds, since they could conclude that antisemitism in that time was not as disgusting and extreme as it proved to be.

To use a less obvious example, Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom contains many offensive premises (cf. that the strength of the individual determines right action, therefore a person who can be forced into sex by a stronger person should be obligated to perform it) which the author develops alongside far more reasonable ones. If an editor decided to purge the book of such ideas, then the reader might not understand the outrage they provoked in Sade's time and long after. Sade might be seen as a libertine who merely fought against things like class disparity, the concentration of wealth and the arbitrary privileges of royalty.

The nature of Sade's offensive ideas is reflected in his offensive language:

120 Days of Sodom contains page after page of what can only be called abstract and dehumanizing sexual equations. Though these equations use pornographic language even as they propose excruciating self-negating acts, they would probably not be considered erotic by anyone including the author. Rather they show Sade's technique of proposing the most alienating ideas possible in order to outrage the reader, which foregrounds the act of reading in a way that would be explored by critical theorists and experimental novelists in the coming centuries (as it were). The offensive ideas are reflected in the offensive language in which they're expressed.

Or to use a second famous example of necessary offensive language:

Purging the diction of Huckleberry Finn of racist epithets would mutilate the effect that Mark Twain intended, which was to illustrate how even a brutally uneducated racist may come to respect the humanity of the people he'd been taught to despise. Without the use of certain words, the effect of Jim's example on the narrator's mindset would be far less apparent, and Finn's ultimate declaration that he would gladly lay down his life for Jim would prove less effective.

The seemingly inept style of the book also satirizes the supposed superiority of certain people in Twain's time, who were stupid enough to dismiss an entire race of human beings as stupid. To purge this seemingly crude style of crude language would only undermine Twain's intentions.

The point in every case is the same:

Change even offensive content -- whether it be an idea or a word -- and you might undermine the significance of the book.