Guardian: In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood

The brave and resourceful small girl in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons, is called Titty. But not, we learn, in the new film version being made by the BBC. There she will be renamed Tatty, to avoid “too many sniggers”.

It’s not the first time this indignity has befallen Titty, who was named after the traditional English fairytale, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, in a more innocent age. (According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word “tits” only started being associated with breasts in about 1928.) She was rechristened Kitty when the story was televised by the BBC in 1963, though she re-emerged with her original name in the 1974 film adaptation, and in a later radio broadcast in 2012.

Names have long been a hazard in children’s literature. ...

“Ejaculate”, another potentially troublesome word, was at one time popular with authors as an alternative to “exclaimed”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – not quite a children’s author but always loved by young readers – used it 23 times in his Sherlock Holmes stories, most arrestingly in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), when Watson, after dozing off in the great detective’s study, reports that “a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up”.

As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified. More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.

“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.

Something similar, again involving a cockerell-shaped fairground attraction, takes place in Angela Thirkell’s 1939 novel The Brandons. This example of light fiction was aimed not at children but at a largely female, middle-class audience whose ultra-respectability amounted to another form of assumed literary innocence.

...

Today, double entendres are the regular stuff of comedy, even when writing for children. When AA Milne referred to Pooh “poohing in the sun” in a poem in The House at Pooh Corner, he unleashed decades of quiet merriment among parents and grandparents aware of how the meaning had changed since they were six. But perhaps the most devoted Milne fans reading to children now would draw the line at two American spin-offs, both picture books: Marlene Brown’s Cooking with Pooh (1995) and Isabel Gaines’s Pooh Gets Stuck (1998). Those earlier, unconscious verbal slips were so much funnier.

Ugh...

And from the earlier, related story:

This is not the first time the character’s name has been modified to avoid smirks: in a 1963 film adaptation, she became Kitty. And book publishers have made similar adjustments to children’s books in recent years: Fanny in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree is now Frannie, and cousin Dick is now cousin Rick, while Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan is now Ned.

Maybe, just maybe, authors wrote in the past using perfectly normal English words and perfectly normal names, and readers read their works without breaking out into fits of giggles every five seconds because...they weren't sex-obsessed potty-brained idiots.

Personally I'm against censorship of any kind of past works, without the author's own explicit permission, which if they're dead, they obviously can't now give, but some reasons make more sense than others.

Image: http://tygertale.com/2014/02/11/the-black-dossier-return-of-the-golliwogg/

The removal of the golliwogs from Blyton for example, is understandable insofar as they were based upon traditional racist stereotypes.  The offence there makes sense.  But Dick ?  Dick is only offensive if we choose to make it offensive.  And just what are we telling children by stripping this perfectly innocent language from their literature ?  And most of these usages historically were innocent, whatever the Guardian's writer may want to infer.

Just grow the fuck up people, and stop destroying our language.