Killing time...

Got a dentist appointment this morning, and Liz is still in the shower, so I have some more time to post...

Read an article today that said that an Auburn professor is "re-writing" Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn so that the 200+ times the "n-word" is used are replaced with "slave". He hopes this will make the work more accessible to modern readers than it is in its original form.

Samuel Clemens wrote that work to show the hypocrisy behind the latent racism of mid-19th Century America ("antebellum" America, really), and I am convinced that his use of words like "nigger" and "Injun" are as important to that point and effort as anything else he penned. These terms were as derogatory then as they are now... and that is why he used them.

If the connotation associated with these words is what is really offensive, then how can replacing the word itself change the message in the book? It can't... but it changes what the author wrote, and that is a sin, I think. Had Clemens wanted to change the book, he had more than 40 years to do so after it was first published and it has been a controversial book since it first hit the shelves in 1884.

Any attempt to change the work to suit "modern tastes" is simply pandering to modern ignorance... and any college professor that wants to do that should think long and hard about finding a new career.