> author's

Should be "authors."

Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling wrote favorably about colonialism; they were replaced with more agreeable authors.

Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.

It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.

> Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.

References to brothers or sisters, or mothers or fathers, is offensive to nonbinary people? In all seriousness, not trying to start a flame war, why is that? Is a reference to hair offensive to a bald person?

Some people have created a self image that is fundamentally incongruous with reality. In order to maintain this unstable self image social reenforcement is required, otherwise the individuals with it will suffer a great deal of cognitive dissonance (dismorphia in their words). For some reason the mental health profession has decided that this particular set of delusions should be reinforced, unlike other types of body dismorphia like anorexia. It has been decided that the public at large is responsible for delivering this care and thus media organizations are retroactively editing old content (Bill Nye and Mr. Rogers are two other examples) to make it appear as if this has always been so. They target children's media in particular in hopes to influence them towards this new way of thinking. So far this has been successful in increasing the number of individuals with this condition, particularly among young women on the autistic spectrum.

>For some reason the mental health profession has decided that this particular set of delusions should be reinforced, unlike other types of body dismorphia like anorexia.

I think the reason here is pretty simple: Turning someone into patient for life is profitable.

Well said. We live in strange times.

Offensive is probably too strong a word.

The reason to replace an aggregate ‘brothers and sisters’ with ‘siblings’, ‘mothers and fathers’ with ‘parents’, or ‘boys and girls’ with ‘children’ is because for all of these the replacement suffices without calling attention to gender when it’s not necessary to do so.

There’s also an argument that the ‘X and Y’ phrasing makes the ‘X’ seem more important than the ‘Y’, or makes it seem like the ‘default’ - just a little, but with repetition the impression is reinforced. If there’s an alternative collective word to use, it avoids this ‘ordering’ issue with no real downside.

Note that all these arguments make sense in even if you consider gender to be a binary thing.

The words siblings, parents and children all existed when Dahl wrote these books, yet he chose to use brothers and sisters, mom and dad, and boys and girls. He specifically used these words, because he's the author and wanted to convey a specific meaning.

I wasn’t trying to make a value judgement about replacing the existing words in Dahl’s already-written books. The parent comment wanted an explanation to _why_ someone might select ‘siblings’ over ‘brothers and sisters’ and I answered with my understanding.

I do now attempt to use the single-word non-gendered collective nouns in speech myself for the reasons I gave, and I think it’s a good idea to do so.

To discuss the edits to Dahl’s work: I would argue that for these ‘Xs and Ys’ examples he was probably just using the popular idioms of the time rather than choosing them to convey a specific meaning as you say. That would certainly be what I would’ve done, without much consideration, 20 years ago!

But that’s obviously not the case for all the edits that are reportedly being made.

The edits in aggregate do make me uneasy. I’m not sure how I’d feel if they were more limited.

> I do now attempt to use the single-word non-gendered collective nouns in speech myself for the reasons I gave

I hate to be the guy that cries “1984,” but do we really have to completely neuter our language to avoid every imagined offense? Are there people out there’s who egos are so fragile that they can’t handle “gentlemen” coming after “ladies?”

No, it’s not the same thing. Parents it’s plural of parent, “10 fathers” are “10 parents”, so are “10 mothers”. When you want to convey the important point that it’s both mothers and fathers, there is no alternative. Similarly for everything else.

Regarding the first occurrence being conceived as more important, it’s the reason usually females appear named first, a sign of courtesy to them. That was sorted out neatly long ago.

I think you’re assuming some sort of extreme militancy about non-gendered language that I don’t have.

Yes, of course you’d need to be specific if it was important. I’d use ‘10 parents’ only if it wasn’t important.

Your example isn’t great though. Even if you assume binary gender for all parents in the group, you couldn’t replace ‘10 parents’ with ‘10 mothers and fathers’ because it’s unclear whether there are 20 people or 10. You’d need to be specific (‘6 mothers and 4 fathers’ or the like).

I don’t think your second paragraph refutes mine at all. I obviously don’t agree that it was ‘sorted out neatly long ago’. You could assume that from the fact that I’ve rethought my own behavior. This world would be a much worse place than it is if people never reconsidered whether the status quo from long ago was optimal.

[Edit: I see now that this comment was not on the same branch as the one where I said I’d rethought my own behavior from a default of e.g. ‘boys and girls’ to ‘children’, so I take back the sentence about you not seeing that. The rest stands though.]

Step-brothers, step-sisters, step-mothers and step-fathers exist, as do foster parents, foster sibling, legal guardians, etc. Some kids' mother or father died, or they're divorced, estranged, etc.

Using the perspective from the OP, it's a kids' book, using a couple of different synonyms might help them better understand what they're reading and not walk away believing that there's something wrong with their family or themselves.

It’s more interesting to see the word ‘woman’ being canceled in subtle ways at once respectable institutes like The Atlantic.

I can be (and in fact am) empathetic. At the same time, I still take the position that non-binary people and other cultural minorities can simultaneously enjoy non-edited older fiction and understand that it may not have been written with them in mind (and may even be mocking or a little mean).

Write new books. Make them as inclusive or exclusive as you want. I just think it's very telling that you hear so much about "erasure" and yet changing an author's words and intent like this is celebrated.

Yeah, that comment is just saying you can understand the changes empathetically. It's not saying they're good.

"That comment is just saying you can understand the changes empathetically"

That's not what they mean when they say empathy. They misuse empathy when they mean compassion.

I think they do it because even they understand it's indecent to say they pity all of these people.

empathy: The ability to identify with or understand another's situation or feelings

compassion: Deep awareness of the suffering of another accompanied by the wish to relieve it.

If you know what they're trying to say, there's little point in making a stink about the particular words they've chosen.

It is - to make it easier to understand it for others, who are confused by the choice of words.

... Maybe you should read GP's comment again. It's not asking for empathy, it's judgmental and imo a little unhinged. It claims saying words like 'shrill' are "gendered", and certain authors are "more agreeable" (what the fuck?) as if that justifies these changes.

Ask for empathy in a preface, or an introduction, if you have to. Stay the fuck out of Dahl's work. You don't have to like it, but changing it is obscene - Dahl is not alive to permit these changes, and would probably be horrified. They're his fucking words.

The word "shrill" (unlike "screeching") is absolutely gendered. It's still fine to use it, and I wouldn't have made, well, any of these edits, but there is nothing unhinged about the comment you're replying to. Don't go looking for enemies on HN threads!

I stated exactly what was unhinged about GP's comment. This whole thing is unhinged. That's my opinion, and that of many others, not some quest for "enemies on HN threads". What a weird take by you.

You, GP, and anyone else seeking justification for silently altering beloved works into newspeak ought to grab a hold of yourselves. That isn't empathy, it's Orwellian censorship to an obvious and absurd degree. As pointed out all over this thread and elsewhere, this is worse than burning books in some ways.

And no, shrill isn't "gendered" any more than "screeching" is. For fuck sake. Every word an author chooses is chosen with care for flavour and tone. Leave them the fuck alone.

Yelling doesn't make the argument more persuasive. Not only is the word "shrill" gendered, it's famously gendered. If you were writing an article about the concept of gendered words, you could do worse than opening with the word "shrill". You could just Google this.

Again: none of this --- nothing I've said, and nothing about the comment you've chosen to angrily respond to --- implies that these changes are good. Maybe the previous commenter believes that; I don't know. But I can't read that out of anything they actually wrote.

I understand the urge to find someone, anyone, to take the other side of your argument. It's no fun to yell at the clouds! But you have to wait for someone to actually make the other argument. You can't just attribute it to people and then hammer away at them.

Your comments in this thread have unfortunately been well into the flamewar zone that the site guidelines ask users to stay out of.

Since we just asked you to stop doing it and you've kept doing it, I think we have to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I made a point of turning off the flags on this submission—I don't have any problem with the article and you can see from my comments in the thread what I think of these edits to Dahl. But you still can't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how provocative someone's comments are or you feel they are.

FWIW, while tptacek's comments to you were probably slightly edgier than usual and maybe a bit over the line, 'gaslighting' seems like a big exaggeration to me.

I can't square that with their last sentence.

Moreover, when I feel empathy with someone who feels different and unrecognized by society, something still keeps me from advocating for the censorship and misrepresentation of a writer's ideas and internal logic.

I think what's stopping me is the knowledge that if I'm fortunate enough to write something that lasts beyond me, I sure as heck don't want anyone updating it for the sensibilities of 2053. Putting myself in someone's shoes, I think there's a word for that

Again: there's no advocacy (at least nothing evident to me) in that comment. It's a descriptive comment, not a normative one.

> It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.

Come on guy, it's not that hard to see. People have been pointing it out to you for hours now.

I feel like there are several people on this thread who don't really understand what "empathy" means.

Please don't cross into personal attack.

I didn't.

What is your relationship to tptacek? Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up.

I'd hardly call dang threatening, unless you're threatened by him politely asking you not to break the rules. And you were. If you find being politely asked to follow the rules threatening, you can politely leave.

"Come on guy" and "people have been pointing it out to you for hours now" are rude and personal. Please make your substantive points without swipes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I didn't see personal attacks from tptacek. Some of his comments in this thread were edgier than I would like but I didn't see any that broke the site guidelines badly enough to warrant a scolding the way your comment did. Based on what I saw, this isn't a borderline call and (in case you're worried about this) it has nothing to do with disagreeing with you—just look at my posts on the actual topic.

> Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up

The active ingredient there is "I see". What people see, and fail to see, is basically determined by their passions on a subject. If all these years of moderation have taught me one thing, it's that.

Yes, what you posted counts as rude and personal by local standards and we ban accounts that do that repeatedly, so please don't do it again.

Re "twisting of people's comments" - that's your interpretation based on your priors. People make these judgments all the time—in fact they come up in nearly every argument as soon as emotions get activated. You're overestimating what moderation can do if you think we should impose our own such interpretations. And they wouldn't agree with your interpretations in any case (how could they?) so you wouldn't get what you wanted even if we did. No one would! In fact it would amplify the complaints about moderation by many orders of magnitude.

If someone is wrong or you think they are, the helpful thing to do is respectfully provide correct information. If you can't or don't want to do that, please just chalk it up to someone being wrong on the internet and walk away. The one who stops posting first in tit-for-tat exchanges is the one who wins anyway.

Also, HN conversations are basically never good once people start arguing about what each other is really saying, so when things take that turn, it's a sign that it's time to stop.

"more agreeable authors" sounds normative to me, and "they were replaced with more agreeable authors" sounds menacing

Why would anyone want to empathize with anyone else? Wanting to feel exactly what someone else is feeling is deeply strange. Sympathize? Sure. One can, to a small degree, feel along the same line as someone else when they've told you what they're going through. But claiming to empathize is claiming to be be able to feel what the other person is feeling, which is an amazingly hubristic claim.

What are you on about?

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your triggers are your responsibility; you can just not read author instead of pushing for and celebrating desecration of their work.

> once you take a position of empathy.

...and the usual thinly veiled "if you don't agree with my opinion you're a Bad Person". How about taking position of sensibility for once ?

> Your triggers are your responsibility; you can just not read author instead of pushing for and celebrating desecration of their work.

The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.

Sure, disclose it is the edited version for "sensitive readers offended by writing of the time" of minority group on the cover and I'm all fine with it.

But it won't happen because that would be honesty and we can't have that from people that push for the changes

> The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.

Nobody would be upset if they were just making a new version of the book. The issue is they're trying to sweep the original under the rug and eventually memoryhole it.

"You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners"

The "owners" (who likely don't have a imaginative bone in their entire skeleton), if you'll pardon my vernacular, should stay the fuck out of the authors original work instead of mucking around with it, particularly inane changes like the removal of the word fat.

And by pushing a new addition of the book while discontinuing the originals they seek to erase the authors original work. If anything this particular addition should have a large CliffsNotes banner on the cover.

At this point, I am tempted for once to think favorably of John Randolph of Roanoke, who once proposed a law to ban the publication of bowdlerized editions of Shakespeare in the United States.

But in that scenario only 1 group is taking responsibility. Not the woke one.

They are very different responses. After you live life a few more decades, the differences become quite obvious.

Joseph Conrad wrote favorably of colonialism?!

Have you read Heart of Darkness?

Well, he said the British were not as bad as the Belgians, I guess... so he must be censored? It's all become satire piled on satire to the point I was entertaining the notion that this story was some kind of early April Fool's edition or something like that.

Thank God. Saying Conrad wrote favorably about Colonialism is so completely wrong and crazy some would say. Heart of Darkness was one of the most anti-colonial books of the 19th century.

Ugh.

If it turns out these beloved stories become out of fashion because of stuff like this, so be it.

Twisting it into something it isn't, to fit current tastes doesn't seem right.

For sure. Just remember though, without changes the work can “simply” retire and the story approached by those who go into it “in the know.”

But … retired stories don’t sell and don’t get turned into remakes, ticket sales, etc…

Rewritten stories are fine, I like lots of them (the new ghostbusters, I adored..) but this, to me, seems like prep work for a lazy hollywood..

>It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.

It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, and it has nothing to do with empathy.

How would you articulate what it has to do with, exactly? I agree with you but I find this topic too slippery to pin down (which is probably intentional).

I'm cringing at this unironic use of the word 'empathy'.

People really need to understand that empathy isn’t strictly good. I’m also surprised how little empathy people see in others. The call for more empathy tends to come off as very self centered and emotional. Childish, really.

> Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.

Meh

Empathy isn’t usually associated with rewriting history, but rather with an urge to volunteer to help the homeless.

You should take your own advice and not force your perspective on other people.

I'm a non-native English speaker. What's wrong with screeching?

"Screeching" in english (at least North American english) is typically a gendered derogative. You generally wouldn't say a man was "screeching", not unless you also wanted to imply he was effeminate.

By avoiding the word, you avoid insinuating the target's gender is part of the issue, and/or avoid insinuating that the target is effeminate when they "should not" be, i.e. you avoid homophobia.

>"Screeching" in english [...] is typically a gendered [...].

It's not.

>You generally wouldn't say a man was "screeching".

Sure you would. I've never seen it posed any other way or with any other intent.

Screeching typically concerns loud, high-pitched, emotional screaming (my connotation, backed up by a quick google).

I am under the impression that, on average, men's voices are lower than women's voices. Hence some connotation.

Doesn't mean men cannot screech, though. Just that there is some reason for making that connection, so at least some folks will make that connection.

I would associate "screeching" with women, just as I would associate "bellowing" with men.

I fail to understand why using these words is bad, though.

It ends up being used to dismiss women levying legitimate criticism. It basically gets used to enforce patriarchy. In practice the opposite is not really true of “bellowing” to the same extent. But even then, gendered insults are falling out of favor in general.

But don’t you realize that YOU are the one arguing that women are inherently screechier?

Either I am completely out of touch, or this comment is nonsense.

A screech is a high pitched sound, nothing more unless otherwise indicated.

It's nonsense and presumably was made up on the spot. Unfortunately it's impossible to tell anymore if the people that write these things actually believe them or are just trolling.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.

more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854743

Screeching (loud piercing sounds) is what eagles some other large birds do. It's also applied to tires which lose their grip on the road during a burnout or the like.

Looks like the character “Screech” will have to adopt a new (nick)-name.

No, the person you replied to was correct (for my region and presumably his). My knowledge of the term mirrors his and I'm kind of disappointed to see so many people asserting there is no common, derogatory, gendered use of the term just because they are unfamiliar with it.

I see a lot of people with no knowledge or experience with this common usage. That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.

> I'm kind of disappointed to see so many people asserting there is no common, derogatory, gendered use of the term just because they are unfamiliar with it.

Maybe worth reconsidering if your understanding of the term is truly "common."

> That's fine, but it's arrogant to assume things you don't know are nonsense.

It also seems pretty arrogant to assert you know better than everyone else.

Given the association of "screeching" with "screeching harpy" and the use of "harpy" to mean a nasty or annoying woman (including in Shakespeare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpy#Linguistic_use_and_appli...), it’s fair to say that it was common, and that there’s a likely function of age.

Men aren’t called "screeching" if they are annoying. Women often are.

- Two years ago on YouTube: "Screeching Leftist Harpy - She's On Crack Cocaine Watch Out!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3ikzwJ2jE) - Seven years ago on Reddit (r/hittablefaces): "This screeching harpy" (https://www.reddit.com/r/hittableFaces/comments/40sc0i/this_...) - One year ago on Reddit (r/justnomil): "Screeching harpy wants to 'help'" (https://www.reddit.com/r/JUSTNOMIL/comments/mst45y/screechin...) - One year ago on YouTube: Screeching harpy karen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ0fskpB9jw)

> It also seems pretty arrogant to assert you know better than everyone else.

I did not assert that. I made a correction, which was in fact correct.

The meaning does exist, and commonly, even if in regions you are unfamiliar with. I did not misuse the word common. I think you just emotionally reacted to being called arrogant, when in fact it was a merited criticism.

It may have a gendered connotation some places, I definitely don’t think it does in my English-speaking country (Australia). Screeching primarily used for inanimate objects (wheels, alarms, etc.) and animals and then secondarily mostly in a non-gendered way for children.

Interestingly the examples in both the entry from Oxford that Google brought up when I searched the term, and the second example in the Cambridge dictionaries are both boys doing the screeching. The other examples are inanimate and screeching describing the experience of tinnitus. So it seems the UK is similar.

So potentially for much of the English-speaking world this term wouldn’t bring up thought of any kind of gendered slur. So it goes both ways - just because something is the case in your region doesn’t mean it’s true across the board.

> So it goes both ways - just because something is the case in your region doesn’t mean it’s true across the board.

I never said nor suggested that it did. I was criticizing the people saying it is not a common usage because they hadn't heard it. You and the other user trying to correct me by repeating how you are from a place where the meaning is different both completely missed the point.

The meaning exists, and is used derogatorily, and definitely commonly in some places. None of what you wrote has any bearing on that.

It's not "nonsense" -- it's "woke praxis." By asserting this new understanding of language, woke activists are able to shape social reality. That's the point of the movement. So comments like this are a form of enacting that world. (And I suppose comments like mine are ways of pushing back against it.) Anyway, the wokies are correct about this very applied or pragmatic aspect of language.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. I know this topic is fraught but your comment here is a noticeable step in that direction ad we want to go exactly the opposite direction: curious conversation is not about smiting enemies or intensifying brawls.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's definitely associations embeded with words that we apparently have measurement systems for.

It'd be really cool if someone familiar with what I'm linking to below could comment, especially regarding the word screech and its related forms!

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720347115

https://github.com/chainsawriot/sweater

https://kawine.github.io/blog/nlp/2019/09/23/bias.html

Is it? I think you have to kind of want it to be gendered.

Screeching is usually associated with high pitched sounds and that is associated with women, to the point men making loud high pitched noises usually gets called "screamed like little girl".

I guess babies also count for screeching.

Sounds like a train of biases to me. Sure certain words currently have certain connotations, and certain words used to have some too. But isn't language allowed to evolve? If a word was used derogatorilly 100 years ago must we ensure that the word is never allowed to change. Rather than removing the connotation, these changes cement them by removing anyone's ability to change them.

To determine the meaning of every word as they've ever been and attempt to remove any that have ever been used in a way that could've upset anyone ever, just makes sure those words will continue to upset people and be painful. There are words with stronger denotations that would take generations to heal but these are words and concepts that the children of today might not even recognize. Should we attempt to solidify pain by hiding truth? Or would it be better to let the youngins change things the way they always do.

If you take their words, they'll just make more. And those new words will not have the ambiguity of our current language.

I mostly associate screeching with owls and monkeys, neither of which are coded feminine.

To be clear (and conciliatory): I see how you connect the dots here. I just think you have to have your antennae extended extra high to pick this signal up, high enough that you'll need to be careful walking under overpasses and stuff.

While engaging in linguistic pedantry, antennae are for insects, antennas are for signals.

What the fuck

https://grammarist.com/usage/antennae-antennas/

I can't even.

I only know this because I work with antennas a lot (and thankfully, never with antennae).

Yeah, I think trying to "correct" such "uninclusive" speech is utter bullshit; 99.9% of the time it is just used to add some colour and flavour to the language used and not to disparage any group

Sure, but at that point you're just saying that a neutral descriptive term is more commonly-applicable to one gender.

Is the word "sobbing" or the word "weeping" derogatory? Visibly-emotional crying is also associated with women, and isn't a stereotypically "manly" thing to do.

I'm saying it could be interpreted that way by extremely uncharitable individuals that try to make their existence out of being offended and fixing "social injustices", instead of recognizing that in vast majority of cases no actual person was even offended, author didn't mean anything close to offending anyone, and the word was just used to make writing more colorful.

Right, sure. I was less arguing with you than highlighting the intellectual bankruptcy of this movement.

women can have deep voices too. dont let your own bias shape your responses like this.

It seems like you are saying women screech more than men.

> avoid insinuating that the target is effeminate when they "should not" be, i.e. you avoid homophobia.

You’re implying that homosexuals are effeminate?

I'm talking about stereotypes here. The _stereotype_ is that gay men are effeminate. I'm sure we both understand that gay men are all unique and have an infinite range of behaviour and action, but think about how many sitcoms have a "guy's guy" doing something traditionally coded feminine, and his buddies all start to get creeped out about him, to audience laughter. Go back far enough, and they'll probably outright even say, "Dude. Gay." (Early South Park, for an example, was rife with this.)

Haha, this is the classic example of answering a question which was merely a rhetorical whip. I love watching this stuff in action. I agree wholesale with you.

Screeching is most definitely more commonly used for women. That doesn't make it a bad word to use.

I mean, you won't catch me dead with these bowdlerized versions. The prose is atrocious and the motives for the changes are dubious.

But screeching is high pitched and when it's used for people is used mostly for women. I'm not going to pretend it's not. That's a comical rewriting of what is true just because you don't like some other rewriting.

"Jerk" is mostly used for men. I need a fainting couch.

nonsense

Define 'man'.

Checkmate

If you're being sarcastic, it's the suitably frivolous response to being woke-scolded by someone not aware enough to use gender carefully.

It’s homophobic to assume men being effeminate makes them gay.

It’s off the mark, sure, but you can think being effeminate makes someone gay without being afraid of gay people.

Since it ultimately comes down to policing straight men and telling them they're not allowed to be effeminate, I'd say it's more misandrist than homophobic.

> effeminate makes someone gay

Guess Tom of Finland didn't get that memo.

I don't think homophobic literally means 'afraid of gay people'. In common use it is more often synonymous with 'gay hating'

This sounds like someone projecting their anxiety And self consciousness.

> You generally wouldn't say a man was "screeching", not unless you also wanted to imply he was effeminate.

You didn't watch Saved by the Bell?!

It sounds like you have access to some objective truth on language that we see missing.

>"Screeching" in english (at least North American english) is typically a gendered derogative.

When HN can't tolerate such an obviously true statement such as this, yet plenty of dog-whistles supporting homophobia and racism and transphobia in this thread stay upvoted, it tells me I probably shouldn't be spending time here anymore. I don't know if I've changed or the community has changed. Probably a bit of both. Maybe it's time to grow up and move on.

Until I saw your comment, I interpreted the downvoting as people taking issue with the astonishing lack of self awareness and bizarrely neurotic hypothetical purity spiral at the end.

IE: Describing a straight male as shrill might make passersby assume he’s abnormal and abnormal men are viewed as homosexual and it would be really awful if you accidentally did a homophobia so stop using the word shrill.

I’d grant that benefit of the doubt if the rest of the thread wasn’t so illuminating on how HN feels about “woke” and how apparently a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.

I heard a new banger quote from John Stuart Mill the other day:

> He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

There's an easy test to see if you understand someone's position in a disagreement. Just summarize their position back to them. They'll tell you if you got it right.

> a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.

This absolutely isn't my position. I don't think you understand why people disagree with you here.

[The full quote by Mill, if anyone is curious: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66643-he-who-knows-only-his... ]

I wasn't talking to you, so it's awfully uncharitable of you to assume everyone else disagrees for such "noble" reasons such as yours. When people tell you who they are, believe them.

I do believe people when they tell me who they are. That’s why I find this claim quite uncharitable, and quite unbelievable:

> [HN believes] a modicum of sensitivity towards historically disadvantaged minorities is the end of civilization.

Do you have any evidence? Can you show me the comments where people “tell you who they are”, and say that having “a modicum of sensitivity toward minorities” will be the end of civilisation?

Your comment just reads as a bitter, low effort ad homenim attack.

I'm curious, have you never actually seen this happening? Like, for one, it's not "abnormal = gay", it's "feminine-gendered terms = gay".

For example, sitcoms used to do this all the time. You'd have two big buff contractors or whatever talking about some work they did, and one of them would say something along the lines of "Hey Frank, that's real cute." Then they'd both realize what was said, get real uncomfortable, the canned laughter would hit, and they'd both stand up, brush themselves off and change the topic hastily.

I understand it's pretty subtle, but jokes and insinuations like this have been a regular part of (at least North American english) culture for a long, long time now.

Can I get dibs on your username?

As somebody with a 2 year old son, I can assure you that screeching is certainly not a gendered thing.

Interestingly, while I get what you're saying - and can agree that "screeching" probably is at least slightly gendered when applied to humans - in my experience I've more often encountered "screeching" applied to non-human entities, like birds. Enough so that I would not automatically make any connection to the use of the word "screeching" as specifically being a gendered derogative aimed at women (although context would dictate a lot about the interpretation of any specific case of course).

Probably a similar thing as with the word "shrill" — it's a word that's mostly applied only to women, so some people interpret the word itself as being sexist (apparently notwithstanding the fact that women have higher voices).

That is hilarious. Such a weak move.

Fire up a Hillary Clinton campaign video and try to describe how she's talking to groups of people without using shrill or screeching.

Nothing except if people are predisposed to think it’s associated with women then that’s how they’ll read it. This tells you more about the censors’ minds being in the gutter than anything else.

For most English speakers, nothing. I am as puzzled as you are.

In addition to what others said, it’s just not a common saying in modern English. If you described someone annoying as screeching, older people likely would understand but most would find it strange language for today.

At 34, I can't imagine that someone 10 or 15 years younger than me would find it strange for me to say something about a car's brakes screeching

Also, what should us older people call a screech owl?

Screeching car tires is common, but the book replaced a screeching woman with an annoying woman.

Sorry for the confusion, language is context dependent, and the context the book used screeching is strange in modern English.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849710.

"folks" is possible the most egerious of these as it's an American version of English and Roald Dahl, while not English was spoke in the English version of English, not the US version.

"Everyone" or "people" would make more sense

Or, you know, ladies and gentleman

I would guess the change was made because they felt ladies and gentlemen does not account for non-binary genders

does that matter when there don't appear to be any non-binary people in any of Roald Dahls works?

Oh my goodness how dare he!

Did you just assume their gender?

(I'll see myself out.)

they forgot the queers so it should have been "folx" in double-non-binary

Goodness how could he assume that before asking their personal pronouns? /s

Ugh. I liked Matilda. But Steinbeck? Seriously? To each his own I guess. How Matilda would have been a fan of Steinback is beyond me. Much less Austin. Matilda would have been a fan of, er, uh, Dahl. And maybe Oz, Baum, Seuss, and Carroll. And any other author whose general vibe was "I kinda like to mess with the world." Definitely Orwell as she got older.

I think it's conceivable Matilda could have been a fan of Austen, but Steinbeck is a very long bow. British children still read mainly British authors and, when taking into account that Dahl is writing from his own experience as a child, that goes more than doubly for the times in which he grew up.

Steinbeck was on the English lit syllabus when I went to school in Britain in the 90s.

Of Mice and Men... Still remember it more than the Shakespeare we had to do...

Tortilla Flat was also lit

I like Steinbeck and don't think these Matilda ought to be a Steinbeck fan. At least they didn't make her a fan of Plath.

The next revision will likely have her reading the 1619 Project.

Matilda might like the SCP Project.

Forget Steinbeck: what's wrong with Kipling all of the sudden? Or have I missed a big round of canceling?

> what's wrong with Kipling all of the sudden?

You're kidding me, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

> In Fantastic Mr Fox a description of tractors, saying that “the machines were both black”, has been cut. In the new Dahl world, it seems, neither machines nor animals can be described with a colour.

And removing any reference to color … for tractors.

This is astounding, I look forward to the time where these types of changes revert back to common sense.

You're going to be waiting for a while then.

Lengthy copyright is a big part of the problem here. Another recent censorship kerfuffle was over Dr. Seuss—one of the books in question was published when my grandmother was in diapers, yet the copyright holders have exclusive control today, more than three decades since Seuss’s death, and will retain it for another full decade from now.

I bet this is much more becase red tractors are easier to convey in the inevitable cartoon adaption. Or the hope John Deere will pay for them to be green.

It was made into a stop motion movie by Wes Anderson.

Could we call them "tractors of color"? Would that be palatable?

> not calling people crazy

Wait until they realize that every single fucking insult in existence is equally "able-ist", by definition. Is the expectation that we slowly disallow insults in culture? No, it's going to be arbitrary whitelisting. Stupid (there I go being ableist).

> Is the expectation that we slowly disallow insults in culture

The current equilibrium seems to be that we're on a sort of vulgar treadmill. The process goes as follows:

1. Decide that previously formal/medical/technical word like "idiot" has developed too many colloquial negative connotations.

2. Invent new formal term, like "mentally retarded", and tell people that they have to use that instead, because the old term is now considered offensive.

3. Because connotation emerges from denotation, the new term develops precisely the same colloquial negative connotations.

4. Rinse and repeat.

The euphemism treadmill is not even just a contemporary phenomenon: it's age-old and not even exclusive to English.

> Wait until they realize that every single fucking insult in existence is equally "able-ist"

goofball potato-head fool wet-napkin shithead fuckface noodle git dipshit dingleberry dillweed bellend fucknuts wanker tosspot toerag unwise nonsense bullshit silly useless wild ridiculous unreasonable unbelievable fantastic absurd

I actually really like replacing my language with non ableist versions. It’s never actually important for me to use the ableist version, and it’s nice to think a little bit when I speak instead of just scraping the bottom of the barrel for the same shit I have always said. The other day I did something unwise and said “wow I’m a potato head”. I thought that was fun.

You can get really mad at people trying to improve their language and gently suggest that others do the same. But your anger is pointless. The language will change. Most of us stopped using “retard” a long time ago for example. You can keep using all that stuff if you want but everyone else is just gonna move on and you’re going to look bad. That’s just the way the world changes.

>potato-head

You'll need to adjust your language as the language has changed.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-can-count-to-potato

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/acprjo/how_did_p...

Frankly any insult that attacks intelligence in any way is going to be ableist. Attack the merits or lack thereof of the argument.

Its true that potato head might be borderline. I suppose I prefer to make the effort and adjust my choices when someone points out my error, than make no effort and ignore feedback I am getting from others. Potato head was new to me and seemed like a good idea, and I did use it against myself. I generally will not insult anyone else's intelligence, but I do suppose that calling myself a potato head might perpetuate that kind of thing. Thanks for the suggestion!

To me, git is ageist.

That’s fair. Where I grew up no one uses that, I just pulled it from some suggestions on Reddit. I’m not actually familiar with how it’s used.

Doesn't fool fall in the same category?

I think of a fool as someone who makes a bad choice, but this isn’t the same as intelligence. Someone can be very smart and very foolish.

Also a typo made me realize that “tool” is perhaps a good non ableist insult.

Fool and goofball are even less subtle.

You like changing your language because you convinced yourself that you’re part of the crew getting to make the changes. Just wait until you’re on the receiving end. Or even better forced to speak a different language, you don’t know, which has happened before under the banner of progress.

On the receiving end of what exactly? Does it feel worse to be called a fool rather than an idiot? I don’t see what you’re getting at.

> forced to speak a different language

It’s very weird to me that you view my choice to use different words as somehow forcing something on others. Culture shifts and changes and there are always people responsible for participating in those changes. Yes sometimes people have used violence to change the language and of course that has generally been horrific. But my choice to simply tweet differently is well within the bounds of the type of normal human change that happens in a healthy society. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything.

The "receiving end" comment was about what happens when society decides that your thought patterns make you a bigot, and you fundamentally disagree.

Lots of older people have this experience as the world changes out from under them.

You're replying to a homophobic troll whose handle is a hex digit substitution code for 0xdeadfa65 = "deadfags", so it's pretty obvious which end he's on, and that he's not arguing in good faith.

On the other hand, I've enjoyed all of your comments, and you've made great points!

hey, you illiterate racist dogshit mongrel https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-potato-head-mum-asks-ir...

> Most of us stopped using “retard” a long time ago for example

This never happened

Its actually hilarious to me that the words you list out could all mostly be incredibly offensive to certain types of people, but you think its ok since its not "ableist".

Really points out how stupid policing literal insults is

If you're right then "able-ist" itself would be an insult and won't be allowed, thus it won't be possible to disallow insults. qed

Able-ist is a criticism.

At least "bad" wasn't changed to "doubleplusungood", but it feels like that's not far away at this rate.

Except none of that is anywhere near good.

I think GP meant that the list was good as a source of information about the changes, not that the changes themselves were good.

In fact, the GGP should've called his list "nice", not "good".

They left in wonky nose, crooked mouth, and stick out teeth, but took out the reference to fat? That's wild.

The fat is arguably the only fixable thing, or at least the cheapest. You can't "just stop eating so much" and fix a wonky nose or stick out teeth.

Calories aren't magic and hard to fathom.

Normalizing being overweight is going to kill a lot of people early.

It's really quite difficult to lose weight and keep it off. Certainly cheaper than dentistry, but still difficult. I read a book called 'Fat Chance' that goes into the science of why it's difficult.

I have little doubt that its difficult, but the point remains that you cant change your lifestyle to become “less ugly” (where ugly is a stand-in for unconventional features, like a crooked nose, yellow/wonky teeth, hunchback or what have you).

I'm a bit conflicted on this. On the one hand there's an absolute overweight & obesity epidemic, roughly 80% of Americans males are Overweight (35%) or Obese (35% obese, 5% extremely obese)[0]. So obviously, it's not easy to maintain a regular weight as 80% fail.

On the other hand these figures are wildly different among humans with similar genetic profiles in other countries, and among humans of the same country 1, 2 or 3 generations ago. In other words: it's not our genetic disposition that's making us fat, it really is our behaviour. And yes it's behaviour in a different food market, but it's behaviour nonetheless.

My parents for example simply as a rule do not buy much processed food and they've always had a normal weight, never dieted, never made any effort apart from eating 'normal' like they were taught or taught themselves. For them a normal diet is as normal as putting on clothes in the morning.

It really is absurdly simple to just buy many kinds of vegetables and eat them with little or no prep. It's really easy to choose to eat lentils. It's really easy to read labels. It's easy to apply the rule to not use sugar in a recipe. It's really easy to make your own salad, I had 'salad making duty' as a kid for the first 20 years of my life or so, we had a salad everyday (we grew up on welfare btw if anyone wants to make the healthy = expensive pricing argument, it's not true). It's really not that hard to eat healthy, in fact it's easier than ever. My grandparents had to visit 10 different small stores where I can go to one supermarket, they had to buy anything fresh constantly for lack of refrigeration where I can store many foods for a long time, they spent a large chunk of their income on food whereas staple foods for me are much cheaper etc etc.

That having been said, both my parents have had quite a bit of dental work as they aged, despite taking good care of their teeth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

Agreed. Every Sunday, I cook a large portion of something healthy, and store it in containers to eat throughout the week. This past week, it was chili with beans. The week before, chicken vegetable brown rice soup. The week before, chunky vegetable spaghetti sauce with whole wheat noodles. I've become pretty good at cooking, so it's always tasty, good food. I always get at least six large servings from what I cook, and the total cost is rarely more than $10.

For breakfast, I usually have oatmeal cooked with soy milk, with a banana chopped in, sweetened with honey. It's unreasonably good, super easy, very filling, healthy, and dirt cheap - probably less than 50 cents per breakfast.

A plate of sliced apples, avocados, whole wheat toast (ideally good specialty bread from a bakery), baby carrots, cheese, and pickled vegetables also makes for tasty, filling, easy, cheap meal.

I've always strongly disagreed with the notion that healthy food is prohibitively expensive. A quick trip to any grocery store proves that eating healthily is cheaper than eating a bunch of processed food, and I've found that you don't even have to put that much effort into cooking to get something that ticks all the boxes.

I can only conclude that most people are some combination of very lazy when it comes to cooking and ignorant about what's possible.

I can’t stand to eat the same meal every day though. That’s the issue I’ve always had when trying meal prep. By Friday I’m ready to hang myself.

Make two or three things, freeze them, heat from frozen.

This is a research and effort issue.

Yeah I've never had that problem, and I think it's because I cook my food exactly the way I want it: extra spicy (as in spices), but also extra spicy (as in capsaicin).

Every bite is better than restaurant-quality to me because it's exactly how I like it.

It's easier than ever to eat healthy, yet 80% of Americans males are overweight. Something is not right here, either of those statements have to be false.

They can both be true, and they are. It’s easier than ever to eat healthy, but thanks to the same abundance, it’s also easier than ever to eat too much, and most Americans choose the latter.

That's probably because everything we've been taught about fat since the 80s turned out to be very wrong. Read up on the problems with the Lipid Hypothesis and the food pyramid which resulted from it.

only 1% of people can lose more than 5kg and keep it off.

if almost 100% of people can't do something, describing it as "not hard to fathom" completely misrepresents the issue.

It's because universities have Fat Studies departments, but don't yet have Wonky Nose Studies departments.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849710 and marked it off topic.

Is it off topic? It's a direct commentary on the precise changes being made? What constitutes off topic in this case?

I mean... it's weird that they (the publishers, or possibly the estate) think it's okay to retroactively edit these books at all, but the specific edits they have made make it all the more bizarre.

It's really very strange to take a view that weight is sacred, but teeth, noses, and other aspects of general appearance are not.

This type of moderation is always a response to the subthread (i.e. root comment plus all descendants), not the root comment alone.

Thanks for explaining; that makes sense, it did descend into a bit of a culture war and become detached from the point.

Thanks for getting it! It's a bit of a subtle point.

Actually it took us years to begin thinking this way but once we figured it out as a principle it changed a ton about how we moderate HN threads.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I wonder when will they start editing Harry Potter, what with the Dursleys being caricature fatsos = villains.

That was my thought. Reading about all the changes had me looking askance at Roald Dahl: it's like, sheesh, somebody's far more edgy than they really needed to be.

But that's who that guy was. That's what came out when he set out to be edgy. Removing it, you might as well write a different book. Misrepresenting who the guy is in order to sugar-coat him seems not the right approach, to me.

So if you do that, you should DEFINITELY edit Harry Potter to get the terfliness out of it, simply because I'd like to see Rowling's reaction to that :)

I don't think the oppressed need their enemies painted over and hidden. I think they need allies. A little more 'You have my bow." "And my axe!"

"Let's just not mention Sauron k?", not really the same effectiveness.

> you should DEFINITELY edit Harry Potter to get the terfliness out of it

Have you actually read Harry Potter? What are you referring to within the books?

Rowling was a progressive darling for years until she expressed disallowed sentiments outside of her fiction writing.

Not quite. Harry Potter is a remarkably pro-status-quo story.

> Rowling was a progressive darling for years until she expressed disallowed sentiments outside of her fiction writing.

Really? Talents based on heredity, the portrayals of the Dursleys as fat, the renditions of other cultures, the questions of whether the goblin bankers echoed anti-Semitic stereotypes, the domestic slavery, etc. got criticism for years. She got some kudos eventually for saying Dumbledore was gay but that was late and never in the books, so it seems pretty minor to hang that theory on.

Knowing the author, she'd probably try to update the book to make Dursley trans.

> Knowing the author

If I were you I would revise this to "having read some recent shallow hit pieces about the author".

Do you know the author?

25 years ago my secondary school English teacher told us that he didn't read Dahl to his kids because of how it equated ugly and fat with bad. Every time I see this trope it reminds me: I think he was right. The books are wonderful in other ways. This makes me more likely to read the them to my kids

> But also other strange things like changing the author's Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck

No one will read this, but I believe the authors Matilda "liked" to read have been judged to be politically incorrect. And we wouldn't want to give sensitive young mind a reason to look them up. /s

> using "folks" instead of "ladies and gentlemen"

For anyone curious to why the word "folks" is chosen, here's great explanation:

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/