THE GLOBE AND MAIL: Mark Twain wrote that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” A new edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in an effort not to offend readers.Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the racially offensive slur appears 219 times in Huck Finn and four times in Tom Sawyer. He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those “which people praise and don't read.”
“It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvellous reading experience and a lot of readers,” Gribben said.
Yet Twain was particular about his words. His letter in 1888 about the right word and the almost right one was “the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” >>> The Associated Press, Montgomery, Ala | Wednesday, January 05, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH – BLOGS – CHRISTOPHER HOWSE: There is a great fuss in America about a new edition of Huckleberry Finn from which the word nigger has been excised. It occurs in the novel 217 times, or 219 (tallies vary, and I have lost count), so its loss makes quite a difference. It is like The Merchant of Venice without the word Jew.
Indeed Jew is far more pejorative in the mouths of Shakespeare’s characters than nigger is in the mouths of some of Mark Twain’s. Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant, resolves to run away, and declares: “I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer.”
We readers of Shakespeare and Mark Twain do not dislike black people or Jewish people. Yet we can be more certain that Twain did not hate blacks than that Shakespeare was not anti-Semitic. Anyone would have to be not only stupid but a fool to miss the fact that Mark Twain was on the side of Jim, the runaway slave in Huckleberry Finn.
Even if we cannot be sure that Shakespeare wasn’t anti-Semitic, should it mean that teenagers at school must never read The Merchant of Venice again? Or, if we are doubtful about Thomas Carlyle’s attitude to emancipated slaves, does that mean nobody should peruse his discourse from 1853, On the Nigger Question?
Striking out the word nigger every time it appears in Huckleberry Finn is a kind of ethnic cleansing, a pretence that in the land of the free no one referred to black people by a demeaning term once the Civil War had been won. >>> Christopher Howse | Wednesday, January 05, 2011
