It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.
Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.
I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children’s book if it were seen as at all offensive.
Words like “bugger” and “damn” used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they’re often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.
I had always heard that it originally meant a stick to be used for kindling and was adapted to smoking once the tobacco trade was a thing. Probably complete horseshit because no internet when I was a kid, but I never bothered to look it up.
A faggot originally meant a bundle of sticks or twigs, and they were used to light fires, but I don’t think this has any relation to “fag” as in cigarette. Etymonline says of the latter:
British slang for “cigarette” (originally, especially, the butt of a smoked cigarette), 1888, probably from fag “loose piece, last remnant of cloth” (late 14c., as in fag-end “extreme end, loose piece,” 1610s)
That meaning of faggot, interestingly, comes from the same root as the Roman symbol “fasces” which is a bundle of sticks from which we get the modern word fascism.
Another fun fact: there’s a traditional British dish called faggots which are a kind of meatball made from offal, somewhat similar to haggis but uncased.
I wonder if straight people were ever convicted of buggery with he opposite sex? I wouldn’t be surprised if “buggery” existed solely to persecute homosexuals back then.
(I was gonna say “non-straight” or “queer” but “homosexuals” read in 30’s English accent sounded funnier to me in my head)
Found one example in the Wikipedia article about the buggery act of 1533, though it seems like he deserved it. I’m not clear if he was actually convicted.
In July 1540, Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford of Heytesbury, was charged with treason for harbouring a known member of the Pilgrimage of Grace movement. He was also accused of buggery, as he was suspected of raping his own daughter. Hungerford was beheaded at Tower Hill,[6] on 28 July 1540, the same day as Thomas Cromwell.
Oh, that’s dark D: Rapists for sure deserve whatever extra harsh punishments can possibly be doled out, so that part’s cool at least. But yeah, other than that then, seems like historically it’s pretty much just to condemn gay peeps. D:
Sodomy used to be a common add on charge in sexual assault cases. I don’t know if it was ever used outside that context other than to harass gay people. I assume buggery was used the same way.
Weren’t idiot, moron and imbecile medical terms specifically used by white scientists to describe black people back in the good old eugenics days of the 1920’s America? Language changes sure but it often has very racist roots.
Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability.[1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement.[2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term. It is similar to imbecile and idiot.[3]
Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term.
Any term for something that is likely to be a target of scorn or mockery has this problem unless it’s so bloodless, detached and clinical that it is effectively only usable as medical jargon and barely has any meaning outside that context. George Carlin once did a bit on this.
Related is how therapy language seems to increasingly be seeping into literally everything.
All good points. It only stuck with me when I heard it because I personally loved the term moron (it’s fun to say and can be really cutting). But I’m also well aware that loads of the words me and my friends used growing up are now (rightly) frowned upon.
Exactly. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, and it takes some getting used to that “queer” is used in a completely different way than nowadays.
Queer is a strange one for me, growing up it was a straight up offensive slur for gay people but now the LGBTQ community has embraced it hard enough to give it its own letter.
I’m 40; “queer” was definitely off-limits and felt very wrong when I was young and absolutely, unquestionably straight. I don’t know when it changed for me, maybe the 2010s?… but now it has zero negative vibes in my mind.
Perhaps my acceptance around that time that I am, and have always been, quite queer was responsible for that change in my life.
I’ve slowly gotten more used to it because it see it used so much in a non-bigoted way, but I think there will always be a bit of cringe on my part with the term.
Maybe i’m too old, but when I was a kid it just meant different, like the family down the street is rather queer, or we played a game where someobody in the classroom would change one thing, like take off their sweater and when you opened your eyes you had to identify which kid was queer
I’ve always heard it as “queer”, and the definition of queer has morphed since then from simply “gay” to “someone whose gender is not easy to define”, or sometimes as an umbrella term for anyone covered by the other letters. The whole thing is rather confusing. I’m content to just treat them like any other people.
But my best gay friend prefers “GSM” for gay and sexual minorities. I don’t like GSM because that is already the Global Standard Man, but I’m a cis-gendered straight white Christian male, so my opinion don’t matter.
I mean… there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.
We’re viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn’t have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.
I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.
I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.
Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.
So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.
I mean I’m terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You’d think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.
My point was there’s this gorgeous actress/model (I think she was a bond girl) who has an amazingly dark skin tone.
I was kind of kidding, as like a “duh” response because I didn’t want to look it up.
Gloria Hendry was the first Black Bond girl, portraying Rosie Carver in the 1973 film Live and Let Die. Other notable Black actresses in the Bond franchise include Halle Berry as Jinx in Die Another Day and Naomie Harris as Moneypenny in Skyfall
With the war and influx of American GIs in Britain, not to mention their colonies, I stand by my statement for Britain as well.
What helps in the case of the UK is a larger percentage of their population lives in cities than the US too. Just by the math living in urban areas you’re just going to see more people and more people from outside your community will be come in.
True. A decade or two earlier might have been different: All the historical examples in this thread had my mind locked in to the twenties or thirties, not the fifties!
The Black and White Minstrel Show is a British light entertainment show on BBC prime-time television that ran from 1958 to 1978. The weekly variety show presented traditional American minstrel and country songs, as well as show tunes and music hall numbers, lavish costuming and often with cast members in blackface.
and that was the problem … the Brits loved the idea of a minstrel show in black face because it had everything they loved about it … presenting black people as comical caricatures to be made fun of while also being presented and performed by white people … because they never thought of hiring and paying for actual black people to do these things.
I mean let’s be real minstrel shows are explicitly a western concept, and were huge in the US. Go down another comment and I addressed the UK as well, but really that’s going to apply anywhere Americans were during WW2 as well.
Anywhere that minstrel shows were popular by the 1950s most of those people would have at least seen a black person. America or otherwise.
If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that’s how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I’d seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).
My friend is also charcoal black, so that’s definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).
While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.
They « were » in theatre and movie production at the time. Black American weren’t allowed to play a role so they used white male with charcoal and shoe shine
Fun fact they were some black actor that did black face as a kind of protestation IIRC
I’m just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn’t as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of “black” that maybe wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years ago.
p64 of the document, p60 of the book
For the lazy who don’t want to look it up
It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.
Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.
I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children’s book if it were seen as at all offensive.
Words like “bugger” and “damn” used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they’re often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.
Fag still is a term for a cigarette…
Yeah, but only in old-timey countries, like England.
I had always heard that it originally meant a stick to be used for kindling and was adapted to smoking once the tobacco trade was a thing. Probably complete horseshit because no internet when I was a kid, but I never bothered to look it up.
A faggot originally meant a bundle of sticks or twigs, and they were used to light fires, but I don’t think this has any relation to “fag” as in cigarette. Etymonline says of the latter:
That meaning of faggot, interestingly, comes from the same root as the Roman symbol “fasces” which is a bundle of sticks from which we get the modern word fascism.
Another fun fact: there’s a traditional British dish called faggots which are a kind of meatball made from offal, somewhat similar to haggis but uncased.
I always knew fascists were a bunch of fags
[im a gay tranny, relax]
Reign in thunder, Queen 🤘
A granny, if you will
Weird I only see removed except for your use of fags in plural. The second is removed in your comment too
Buggery used to be a crime, now it’s a gay way to spend an afternoon
I wonder if straight people were ever convicted of buggery with he opposite sex? I wouldn’t be surprised if “buggery” existed solely to persecute homosexuals back then.
(I was gonna say “non-straight” or “queer” but “homosexuals” read in 30’s English accent sounded funnier to me in my head)
Found one example in the Wikipedia article about the buggery act of 1533, though it seems like he deserved it. I’m not clear if he was actually convicted.
Oh, that’s dark D: Rapists for sure deserve whatever extra harsh punishments can possibly be doled out, so that part’s cool at least. But yeah, other than that then, seems like historically it’s pretty much just to condemn gay peeps. D:
Sodomy used to be a common add on charge in sexual assault cases. I don’t know if it was ever used outside that context other than to harass gay people. I assume buggery was used the same way.
Good on adding more charges to sexual assault.
Boo on using any charges to harass gay peeps D:
Nice one.
Weren’t idiot, moron and imbecile medical terms specifically used by white scientists to describe black people back in the good old eugenics days of the 1920’s America? Language changes sure but it often has very racist roots.
I’ve never heard anything about it having a racial component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology)?wprov=sfla1
Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability.[1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement.[2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term. It is similar to imbecile and idiot.[3]
Any term for something that is likely to be a target of scorn or mockery has this problem unless it’s so bloodless, detached and clinical that it is effectively only usable as medical jargon and barely has any meaning outside that context. George Carlin once did a bit on this.
Related is how therapy language seems to increasingly be seeping into literally everything.
All good points. It only stuck with me when I heard it because I personally loved the term moron (it’s fun to say and can be really cutting). But I’m also well aware that loads of the words me and my friends used growing up are now (rightly) frowned upon.
Eugenics was related to racism, but it wasn’t the same thing as racism.
The intellectual ability / disability axis of eugenics was completely different from its skin colour axis.
I’m sure there was quite a bit of crossover between the eugenics people and racists.
Exactly. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, and it takes some getting used to that “queer” is used in a completely different way than nowadays.
Queer is a strange one for me, growing up it was a straight up offensive slur for gay people but now the LGBTQ community has embraced it hard enough to give it its own letter.
As a Gen Xer, same. I still don’t like using the word due to the negative connotation it used to have.
I’m 40; “queer” was definitely off-limits and felt very wrong when I was young and absolutely, unquestionably straight. I don’t know when it changed for me, maybe the 2010s?… but now it has zero negative vibes in my mind.
Perhaps my acceptance around that time that I am, and have always been, quite queer was responsible for that change in my life.
I don’t identify with the term, which definitely makes a difference! It was (very successfully) reclaimed from the bigots to empower LGBTQ people.
Side note, it was nice to see Homer get over his homophobia!
Yeah, same. It still feels as weird and wrong as the f word or the n word.
I’ve slowly gotten more used to it because it see it used so much in a non-bigoted way, but I think there will always be a bit of cringe on my part with the term.
I thought Q was for questioning.
Maybe i’m too old, but when I was a kid it just meant different, like the family down the street is rather queer, or we played a game where someobody in the classroom would change one thing, like take off their sweater and when you opened your eyes you had to identify which kid was queer
I’ve always heard it as “queer”, and the definition of queer has morphed since then from simply “gay” to “someone whose gender is not easy to define”, or sometimes as an umbrella term for anyone covered by the other letters. The whole thing is rather confusing. I’m content to just treat them like any other people.
But my best gay friend prefers “GSM” for gay and sexual minorities. I don’t like GSM because that is already the Global Standard Man, but I’m a cis-gendered straight white Christian male, so my opinion don’t matter.
I must be old, since the original meaning is still what comes to mind first when I hear it in a non-LGBTQ context.
This is from South Africa in the year 2000. It just means unusual in this context.
https://www.songlyrics.com/saron-gas/beer-lyrics/
“Bah humbug,” was that era’s equivalent of Scrooge wandering around saying, “whatever, bullshit.”
Enid Blyton used it a surprising amount. But she was also considered old-fashioned and racist by critics at the time, so…
It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.
It was called out for being offensive even in that time by fellow English.
I mean it is from 1951. I’ve seen a lot worse by people who meant it.
It’s 4 years before Emmett Till was murdered for example.
I mean… there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.
We’re viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn’t have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.
I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.
until 1985!
I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.
Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.
So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.
I wonder if Carlin ever tried sneaking that past the censors.
George Carlin was voicing Mr Conductor in the American dubs in the 1990s, so a solid 20 years after the retraction
I don’t remember him really weighing in on that word. And if I’m not mistaken he was friends with Richard Pryor.
It was NOT one of his 7 words you can’t say on T.V.
I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. Black people aren’t charcoal black.
According to old-timey racists, they are.
Exactly … according to old-timey racists in the 1950s … this is what they imagined about black people
I mean I’m terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You’d think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.
My point was there’s this gorgeous actress/model (I think she was a bond girl) who has an amazingly dark skin tone.
You mean Halle Berry?
No like two decades earlier. Opposite Connery or Dalton
Grace Jones?
I think so? Like I said, horrible with names
I was kind of kidding, as like a “duh” response because I didn’t want to look it up.
Yeah I could look it up too but that would defeat the purpose
In the 1950s … to average white people who might have never seen a black person before … they would imagine this
I can promise you that the vast majority of white Americans had seen a black person in the 1950s.
This is a British book, though
With the war and influx of American GIs in Britain, not to mention their colonies, I stand by my statement for Britain as well.
What helps in the case of the UK is a larger percentage of their population lives in cities than the US too. Just by the math living in urban areas you’re just going to see more people and more people from outside your community will be come in.
True. A decade or two earlier might have been different: All the historical examples in this thread had my mind locked in to the twenties or thirties, not the fifties!
I don’t think minstrel shows with black face were common in Britain?
It’s more likely that white British people took it as “much darker than the skin we’re assuming for people” which is enough to make the simile work.
You’d be wrong on that I’m afraid:
and that was the problem … the Brits loved the idea of a minstrel show in black face because it had everything they loved about it … presenting black people as comical caricatures to be made fun of while also being presented and performed by white people … because they never thought of hiring and paying for actual black people to do these things.
What the fuck‽ Until '78‽
:(
I’ll hope that it was still less common than in the US
I know it’s difficult to grasp the idea that the world is larger than just the US. But you’ll just have to try.
I mean let’s be real minstrel shows are explicitly a western concept, and were huge in the US. Go down another comment and I addressed the UK as well, but really that’s going to apply anywhere Americans were during WW2 as well.
Anywhere that minstrel shows were popular by the 1950s most of those people would have at least seen a black person. America or otherwise.
The whole idea of minstrel shows was to mock africans. Seeing a white guy in blackface is not equivalent to seeing a black person.
What the fuck are you talking about?
My whole point was by 1950 most white people had seen a black person and that their only idea wasn’t a minstrel show
lies, lies! foreign countries are just made up for the movies
If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that’s how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I’d seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).
My friend is also charcoal black, so that’s definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).
Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?
Alright, that’s actually pretty funny.
While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.
They « were » in theatre and movie production at the time. Black American weren’t allowed to play a role so they used white male with charcoal and shoe shine
Fun fact they were some black actor that did black face as a kind of protestation IIRC
I’m just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn’t as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of “black” that maybe wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years ago.
Just a random thought
Outdated but not offensive, a lot better than it could have been.
I’m too lazy even for this. I need a red circle and perhaps some Family Guy to get my attention.
Last word
Ahh yes, the famous last word.