Replacing ‘offensive’ words is not Woke, it’s Reckless!
Changing words like ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘black’ in Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book is ridiculous. What are we saying about society today, and what are we doing to our children? I couldn’t resist a rant on this.
Brown Car Guy 
Hello Shazad. Many thanks. Read about this in the ‘Daily Mail’.
The problem is due to the fact that there was a rift between Roald Dahl and some of his family (families, don’t you just love them? LOL!) and a part of Mr Dahl’s family sold their interests in the late Roald Dahl’s intellectual property (i.e. his books and authorship) to Penguin Books (who also own Puffin Books).
Penguin and Puffin brought in ‘Sensitivity Readers’ (WHAT?!) who deemed the books need to be ‘fine-tuned’ for today’s readership (in other words, make them not anti-semitic as Roald Dahl was allegedly anti-semitic, or insulting any sensitive weaklings in our society and also politically correct and ‘wanky-wokery’). The result is watered down and downright ghastly ‘interpretations’ of the classic Dahl books that people have grown up with. Fortunately there was a major public backlash and now alongside the wokeist rubbish books are the untampered originals. Recent sales figures indicate many people purchasing the originals whilst the ‘Woke’ versions are….well…., not doing terribly well! (as Sgt-Major Williams would say in ‘It Aint Alf Hot, Mum’, “Oh dear, how sad, never mind!”).
I spoke to a solicitor friend of mine about this and he mentioned a case he had to do in the High Court some years ago. An author wanted his family to continue to benefit from his intellectual property without the 50-year-rule on copyright allowing the public and dubious other parties access his works and result in his family not getting any further income beyond the 50-year ruling. All he did was to engage my legal friend in court to extend the copyright another 50 years. As the government was not present in court to challenge this, case was awared to the author to extend copyright in family ownership (in other words, 100 years after author’s death). My legal chum reckoned this would allow a family of a late author to also keep the works ‘Woke-free’. If a publisher got too ‘Wokeist’ then the copyright owner could merely takes his/her business up or down the street, so to speak (or get a private publisher, known as a ‘Pirate Publisher’ as they are outside the normal publishing houses). The key is ‘Never sell your interests to the publishers’.
Keep up the good work, Shazad.
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Hello again Steve. Thanks for this – some great insight and info I did not know about. Brilliant. Thank you. I have absolutely no issues with applying today’s cultural norms to art and literature of the day, but I strongly object to changing art and literature from the past. If we consider them mistakes, they should remain for us to see, examine and contemplate. I believe an unfiltered view of the past can inform a better future.
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Hello Shazad, My pleasure, sir. There was a report on this matter in an edition of the ‘Daily Mail’ that I read and also a in-depth report and comment on this by Mail reporter Sarah Vine (Michael Gove’s Ex-Wife. How such a lovely lady like her got married to Gove and got dumped by him is anyone’s guess!). She’s a great reporter and is quite a cheerful and intelligent woman in interviews I have seen her do.
I totally agree with your viewpoints and would also add a quote my Deputy Manager in the Metropolitan Police Historical Museum found to sum things up, ‘Only by learning from the past can you create a better future’.
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