this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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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.
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.
Oh, that’s dark D: Rapists for sure deserve whatever extra harsh punishments can possibly be doled out, so that part’s cool at least. But yeah, other than that then, seems like historically it’s pretty much just to condemn gay peeps. D:
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.
Good on adding more charges to sexual assault.
Boo on using any charges to harass gay peeps D:
"Bah humbug," was that era's equivalent of Scrooge wandering around saying, "whatever, bullshit."
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.
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 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.
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.
I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. 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
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
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).