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Originally Posted by pendragginp
 Wow, this sure brought out a lot of holier-than-thous from the woodwork! I have no problem with other parents raising their children as they see fit, and I'm not going to sit around and act like they're soooo stupid and I'm soooo much smarter and better.
I read to my children all the time, and I expurgated certain words from the books I read them. I'm not going to use the 'n' word about Jim, for instance, when I read them Huck Finn. I AM going to explain the history of this word and why we don't use it.
Same thing with To Kill A Mockingbird when I read it to them. Scout does swear a bit, and since I didn't want them to think I was okay with my children swearing, I just left out some of those words or changed them. Sue me. |
Yes--which, as a parent, was your rightful choice to make. You made it in context, and as a part of the discussion--not as an absentee landlord letting an app make the decision for you, to alleviate you of the responsibility. That's my gripe. I do think the whole argument over "cursing" assumes that the hearer is infantile; but I respect that every parent has the right to make that choice for their kids. It's the abandonment of the intelligent choice that I'm not cheery about.
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There are a lot of books that have a lot of value in them, and it doesn't lie in the fact that they contain profanity. Losing that bit rarely hurts the book, and if cutting it out will make an otherwise valuable book available to children - well, obviously that was the route I chose.
And as for getting all up in the air about 'changing something someone wrote' - what, pray tell, does every adaptation and abridgment do? That's a specious argument; changing books happens all the time. I get far more upset about going to see a movie made from a book and finding that basically all that has been retained is the title and the poor author's name.
Live and let live, folks. Live and let live.
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Abridgements and adaptations are licensed. They're not created from the original works without the author's consent or payment thereto. Not all works have been abridged, condensed, chopped, sliced or served, for this very reason. And yes, lots of books get optioned, and made into vapid movies, sadly. But that too--at least the author is compensated for the pain. When my clients sell their options, no matter how much they know that they'll be unhappy with the results down the road--at least they've put real money in their pocket now. Suzie Censor and her white-out likely isn't doing that. I doubt she's even asking permission--much less paying for the privilege of censoring the reading material that, by and large, she's decided her kids can hear. For that matter, I'd still mind less if she did that, then use an auto-magic censorship app.
It's this kind of bullcrap that's resulted in almost no viable adult--by which I mean, simply grown-up--entertainment in the past two decades. Now everything is Disney-fied, so that it doesn't break the PG barrier, and we have pablum.
Hitch