By Bill Jones
``Nigger," ``Injun," ``Half-breed." ``Dumb down," ``whitewash," ``water down." What do these expressions conjure up? What affect and effect?
Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books have taken it upon themselves to change the history of the Old South. They have spurred a debate by their bold bowdlerization of Twain's classic.
Specifically, Gribben replaces 219 references to ``nigger" with ``slave," and ``Injun" with ``Indian," and ``half-breed" with ``half-blood." His blanket reasoning: ``Students resent textual encounters with this racial appellative." Gribben further opines that the pervasive use of such expressions makes it harder for students to read or absorb the book and he wished to give an option for those uncomfortable with the reading of it.
Mark Twain's words were timely; it was the accepted vernacular of the day. Specifically, the Missouri Negro dialect, backwoods Southwestern dialect, and Pike County dialects which he so well animated in ``Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Aside from making money and attempting to be politically correct, his censorship and intent is suspicious as reported in USA Today by Michael Winter, ``Gribben said that he grew up never hearing the N-word..." What isolated cocoon beyond the everyday world did he grow up in?
Twain was a skillful wordsmith. He never pushed a noun toward a verb and never pushed an adjective toward a noun without careful consideration. Early on he penned a letter to the Brooklyn Library Children's Room where his two books were banned, he said ``I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them."
One authoress says that contemporary readers surprised or offended by the N-word seems questionable and that one of the intentions of art is to provoke and unsettle. It is bandied about daily. It is the tone and intention of the speaker, how the word is said that conveys its power.
H.G. Wells said, ``No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." Editors' deletions and additions was a perennial source of controversy for Mark Twain. It is most certain that he would oppose Gribben's derivative work. It doesn't augment or enhance the classic; it diminishes and impoverishes the grit of historical reality.
Usually peers are in the business of censuring, and officials are in the business of censoring. Gribben and New South Books are neither peers nor officials. They are not linguistic literature police. Their tampering has neutered the potency of Twain's work and therefore they are vandalistic. Any educator employing their radical revision is not teaching Twain, and hence engaged in intellectual dishonesty.
Should public opinion accept expunging and expurgating by self-appointed critics at large, then we have truly lost freedom of speech and press. Why these purists will surely move on to purge other writings as well as other art forms and crafts. All media will be in jeopardy. And, when they are done, they will begin in on euphemistic expressions. Why the initialism itself is an obscenity symbol!
All words have purpose or they wouldn't exist. Certain representatives besought, petitioned, and lobbied the Director of Defining of Merriam-Webster. Their wish was for the lexicographers to supplement and clarify the meanings and sense of the N-word. They subscribed wholeheartedly to the idea that it should denote and connote the most certain pejorative and vituperativeness of the utterance and to make it unequivocally clear that it is indeed taboo, verboten, and unacceptable as it is the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English. Thus, now it stands as a confident entry representing the changing times.
Notwithstanding it needs to be said that Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens used the term as meaning simply a black person or a member of any dark-skinned race, an East Indian, a Filipino, or an Egyptian, etc., even if improperly or loosely. In all fairness to the word, it must be noted that the new sense didn't arrive until the turn of the twentieth century.
Dignity endures labels and name-calling. Yet, I agree with Albert Einstein: Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background.
William Roger Jones has taught English in Korea for five years. He presently teaches with the English Program in Korea (EPIK). He has written a novella with his Korean wife entitled ``Beyond Harvard.'' He can be reached at billjones47@hotmail.com.