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?
Just in case it's necessary: I make no judgement of any kind on anyone for his or her sexual orientation. It's none of my damn business.
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Would you modify Shakespeare's works because we don't use that form of English any longer? What you've done is wrong. What you've done is basically telling us that we are too stupid to understand things the way the author intended. That we are too stupid to get the meaning of those works from the context of the book. You are not giving us credit for being able to read and understand what's written.
You should be ashamed for what you've done without making it known when you posted this modified book.