Some words hurt. Does that mean they should never be used?
By Francis Moran
I really don’t know what I think about the recent editing of Mark Twain’s classic American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to replace the offensive word “nigger” with the more prosaic “slave.” The objectionable word was common parlance when Twain wrote this masterpiece of life along the Mississippi River in the southern United States in the mid-1880s and I am loath to see anyone tamper with an original work of such brilliance.
I do know that when I shared Huck with my then-tweenaged boys as part of our long-standing nighttime story-reading ritual, that I felt just as uncomfortable as Michael Chabon, although, unlike Chabon, I opted not to substitute something softer. I had ploughed through the far fewer iterations of the word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, albeit with some trepidation, and I saw no reason to do otherwise with the sequel. Equally difficult were references to the character “Injun Joe” and the persistent use of vernacular speech that made Jim sound very much like the social and intellectual inferior he was held to be at the time. But I read aloud every word that Twain wrote.
