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https://www.scribd.com/document/899239966/Henry-the-Green-Engine-1951-Scanned-by-ThatERTLGuy
Page 60. Published in 1950, and retracted in 1972 from my quick research.
p64 of the document, p60 of the book
For the lazy who don’t want to look it up
It feels so out of the blue, so unnecessary. Like the writer had been bored. It’s difficult to imagine that this didn’t jolt readers out of the story, even at the time.
Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.
I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children’s book if it were seen as at all offensive.
Words like “bugger” and “damn” used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they’re often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.
Fag still is a term for a cigarette…
Yeah, but only in old-timey countries, like England.
I had always heard that it originally meant a stick to be used for kindling and was adapted to smoking once the tobacco trade was a thing. Probably complete horseshit because no internet when I was a kid, but I never bothered to look it up.
A faggot originally meant a bundle of sticks or twigs, and they were used to light fires, but I don’t think this has any relation to “fag” as in cigarette. Etymonline says of the latter:
British slang for “cigarette” (originally, especially, the butt of a smoked cigarette), 1888, probably from fag “loose piece, last remnant of cloth” (late 14c., as in fag-end “extreme end, loose piece,” 1610s)
That meaning of faggot, interestingly, comes from the same root as the Roman symbol “fasces” which is a bundle of sticks from which we get the modern word fascism.
Another fun fact: there’s a traditional British dish called faggots which are a kind of meatball made from offal, somewhat similar to haggis but uncased.
Exactly. I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, and it takes some getting used to that “queer” is used in a completely different way than nowadays.
Queer is a strange one for me, growing up it was a straight up offensive slur for gay people but now the LGBTQ community has embraced it hard enough to give it its own letter.
As a Gen Xer, same. I still don’t like using the word due to the negative connotation it used to have.
I thought Q was for questioning.
Maybe i’m too old, but when I was a kid it just meant different, like the family down the street is rather queer, or we played a game where someobody in the classroom would change one thing, like take off their sweater and when you opened your eyes you had to identify which kid was queer
I must be old, since the original meaning is still what comes to mind first when I hear it in a non-LGBTQ context.
This is from South Africa in the year 2000. It just means unusual in this context.
Weren’t idiot, moron and imbecile medical terms specifically used by white scientists to describe black people back in the good old eugenics days of the 1920’s America? Language changes sure but it often has very racist roots.
I’ve never heard anything about it having a racial component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology)?wprov=sfla1
Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability.[1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement.[2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term. It is similar to imbecile and idiot.[3]
Buggery used to be a crime, now it’s a gay way to spend an afternoon
I wonder if straight people were ever convicted of buggery with he opposite sex? I wouldn’t be surprised if “buggery” existed solely to persecute homosexuals back then.
(I was gonna say “non-straight” or “queer” but “homosexuals” read in 30’s English accent sounded funnier to me in my head)
Found one example in the Wikipedia article about the buggery act of 1533, though it seems like he deserved it. I’m not clear if he was actually convicted.
In July 1540, Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford of Heytesbury, was charged with treason for harbouring a known member of the Pilgrimage of Grace movement. He was also accused of buggery, as he was suspected of raping his own daughter. Hungerford was beheaded at Tower Hill,[6] on 28 July 1540, the same day as Thomas Cromwell.
Sodomy used to be a common add on charge in sexual assault cases. I don’t know if it was ever used outside that context other than to harass gay people. I assume buggery was used the same way.
Nice one.
Enid Blyton used it a surprising amount. But she was also considered old-fashioned and racist by critics at the time, so…
“Bah humbug,” was that era’s equivalent of Scrooge wandering around saying, “whatever, bullshit.”
I mean… there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.
We’re viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn’t have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.
I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.
there’s also a famous Agatha Christie’s book that used to have the N-word in its title.
until 1985!
I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.
Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.
So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.
It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.
It was called out for being offensive even in that time by fellow English.
I mean it is from 1951. I’ve seen a lot worse by people who meant it.
It’s 4 years before Emmett Till was murdered for example.
I wonder if Carlin ever tried sneaking that past the censors.
George Carlin was voicing Mr Conductor in the American dubs in the 1990s, so a solid 20 years after the retraction
I don’t remember him really weighing in on that word. And if I’m not mistaken he was friends with Richard Pryor.
It was NOT one of his 7 words you can’t say on T.V.
I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. Black people aren’t charcoal black.
Black people aren’t charcoal black.
According to old-timey racists, they are.
Exactly … according to old-timey racists in the 1950s … this is what they imagined about black people
I mean I’m terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You’d think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.
My point was there’s this gorgeous actress/model (I think she was a bond girl) who has an amazingly dark skin tone.
You mean Halle Berry?
No like two decades earlier. Opposite Connery or Dalton
In the 1950s … to average white people who might have never seen a black person before … they would imagine this
I can promise you that the vast majority of white Americans had seen a black person in the 1950s.
This is a British book, though
With the war and influx of American GIs in Britain, not to mention their colonies, I stand by my statement for Britain as well.
What helps in the case of the UK is a larger percentage of their population lives in cities than the US too. Just by the math living in urban areas you’re just going to see more people and more people from outside your community will be come in.
I don’t think minstrel shows with black face were common in Britain?
It’s more likely that white British people took it as “much darker than the skin we’re assuming for people” which is enough to make the simile work.
I know it’s difficult to grasp the idea that the world is larger than just the US. But you’ll just have to try.
I mean let’s be real minstrel shows are explicitly a western concept, and were huge in the US. Go down another comment and I addressed the UK as well, but really that’s going to apply anywhere Americans were during WW2 as well.
Anywhere that minstrel shows were popular by the 1950s most of those people would have at least seen a black person. America or otherwise.
lies, lies! foreign countries are just made up for the movies
Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?
Alright, that’s actually pretty funny.
If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that’s how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I’d seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).
My friend is also charcoal black, so that’s definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).
They « were » in theatre and movie production at the time. Black American weren’t allowed to play a role so they used white male with charcoal and shoe shine
Fun fact they were some black actor that did black face as a kind of protestation IIRC
I’m just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn’t as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of “black” that maybe wasn’t as popular nearly 100 years ago.
Just a random thought
While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.
I’m too lazy even for this. I need a red circle and perhaps some Family Guy to get my attention.
Last word
Ahh yes, the famous last word.
Outdated but not offensive, a lot better than it could have been.
Came for the n-word, stayed for the story. Those silly trains.
That author was definitely a Diesel.
Bullet Train mention 🚆🚄🚩
I was hoping someone would get it since I hadn’t seen it referenced yet
Well done, Henry.
well then, I assumed it was negros, I was wrong.
Unironically a great example for explaining the difference between 0 and null
Sadly, it’s not. The other three churn out books riddled with the n-word daily.
great example of the difference between Some(0) and None
There are different kinds of non-number “values” for numeric variables. Is this
∞,Overflow,NaNorN/A?I’m a JavaScript girl, I only know about null and undefined. But my guess would be
N/A, just by method of elimination?∞: They said the N-word, but if we ask “did they say the N-word yesterday?” and go back a day if the answer is no, we will be iterating forever.Overflow: They said the N-word sometime before Jan 1st 1970.NaN: Days since the last time they said the N-word: “yes”There are actually two interpretations of
N/A:N/A(not available): There is lost media so it can’t be evaluated.N/A(not applicable): The show is in sign language so evaluating that is outside the scope of this string-matching program.
Meanwhile,
undefinedseems to mean the value has not yet been evaluated. Maybenullis really the best.All these special values are from the spec for floating point numbers, integers don’t have them, in JS specifically all numbers are floats.
An
Option<int>does a good of showing intent.🎵 I’m a Java girl in a Java world…
Sadly, JavaScript breaks the cadence :(
Whaaat Javascript is famously known for being extremely weird with NaN values lol
Yeah but we almost never use them intentionally. In almost any project, NaN only happens if there’s a bug. The others are regularly on purpose.
People use NaN on purpose? 😨😨😨
I mean,
NaNimplies there exists some value, it’s just not a numerical one.nullsays there is none at all.
Ah yes, “Thomas says the N-word by accident, while singing a rap song” episode, my favorite.
Thomas the Dank Engine
💀
THOMAS THE DAAAAANK ENGINE!!!
😅 😂 😂
This song will always live in my head rent free
Just so you know; there’s a bunch of gangster rap songs that fit the tune and they can be found on youtube.
byob by system of a down fits too
I’m so happy to see this posted in the wild
I’ve got a whole collection of dank songs saved on soundcloud. it really was a great soundclown scene 5-10 years ago, there’s some truly great stuff in there
I’d imagine anyone involved with that decision is dead today. Granted thats around 75 years ago. Still a crazy stat though. Mr. Roger’s TILL I DIE.
The intent and impact of the word was a lot different back then, certainly so outside of the US, but still, using a subset of humanity as a stand-in for an adjective is pretty grim stuff. Shows how little was thought of them. Like if the characters had instead become white from a flour mill explosion, it’s unlikely they’d have been described as being “as white as scampering little crackers”.
There was that Barney coloring book that advocated for blood orgies but they caught it and recalled it fairly quick
Please, tell me more.
And it wasn’t either of the yank ones.
He’s old and senile so he gets a pass … right?
No.
Sorry… forgot the /s.
I figured since this was lemmy it would be apparent
Edit: just checked the community this post is in. It DEFINITELY should’ve been apparent
Awesome now I have to hate Thomas the Tank Engine
Eh, pretty sure it’s referring to books published around 1945, after WWII (273242 days is ~75 years) so of course it’s going to contain inherently racist shit. I don’t think one should hate a whole series because it wasn’t talking about civil rights and equality in an era where those barely existed unless you were a white man. Heck, if Thomas & Friends was talking about that it probably would’ve been banned.
And you didn’t already hate them for the dark and depressing messages they made by saying if your friends or family get old and unable to take care of themselves, the best way to deal with them is to seal them in a concrete tomb still alive, and let them die in there as they cry out in horror?
That part never struck a chord with you?
No that made perfect sense as someone whose retirement plan is wandering into the wilderness.
That part never struck a chord with you?
No because the last time I seriously thought about Thomas The Tank Engine was when I was 3 years old
Really? You’re just going to sit there and claim you never watched Thomas The Train bondage porn with Ringo Starr impersonator narrating?
… Does this … exist???
Your friends and family are railway locomotives?
If your friends aren’t down for trains, are they really your friends?
You guys are getting paid?
If I were a train in the Thomas the Tank world I would be.
For the love of god, Montresor!
The franchise was originally started by an avowed fascist … and it really shows through sometimes.
You sound like you don’t want to produce capital for your overlords, time to be sealed into a railway tunnel and left to rot. I bet ringo starr would even say you deserved it.
How was this posted before the Ringo Starr porn comment?? Is this a thing???
Citation needed. He was a committed pacifist following his Brother’s death in WWI.
sorry
Lol what
Oh boy. Here come the cancel train again
Are we not saying “as black as removed’s” again? I thought that kind of stuff was back on the menu. I’m getting tired of having to restrict my bigotry. How am I supposed to keep up with who I’m better than if it keeps changing like this.
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Fuck off back to Xitter 😬
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You pussied out anyways
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