Dahl ban a Revolting phase
The recent decision by German discount supermarket chain Aldi's Australian wing to remove Roald Dahl's 1982 children's book Revolting Rhymes from its shelves after a customer objected to Dahl's use of the word "slut" raises some interesting issues.
As many commentators have pointed out, Dahl was no doubt using the word in its now archaic sense of, as the Oxford Dictionary has it, "a woman with low standards of cleanliness" and therefore synonymously with "slattern".
But it's not just the meaning of words that change or lose their alternative meanings over time — it's mores as well. Remember that new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which came out a few years back, shorn of words such as "nigger" and "injun"? And what about golliwogs? Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie no longer able to share a bed?
These are all common enough examples, and I'm not going to get into the whole what-children-should-and-shouldn't-read debate here. More pernicious perhaps is the seemingly casual (mis)use of everyday language which can reflect the subconscious attitudes of a whole society. Two examples will suffice.
The unisex use of "actor" has always worried me. It's ostensibly still a masculine noun, and such usage doesn't equate with equality of the sexes at all. It's merely another example of male dominance. I understand that through custom and usage its meaning has changed to refer to both sexes: we only have to look at the similar, more established use of words with the Latin masculine "-or" suffix such as "director" to see how it needn't be an issue. It's how such usage came about that's the problem. The word "actress" might have been virtually synonymous with the word "prostitute" in past centuries, but it's no longer a dirty word — though you could be forgiven for thinking it is.
Similarly, have you noticed how many people, even the most educated and enlightened among us, are increasingly using "that" in place of "who". Instead of "The woman who wrote a controversial book on language use" you're more likely to hear "The woman that wrote a controversial book on language use".
You can put this down to mere carelessness. Or you can put this down to a subconscious objectifying of living beings. Either way, it not only reflects badly on us as a society of language users; it can also have a subtle yet potentially devastating role in shaping our attitudes towards others. We think, therefore we are.
