| From
the July/August 2004 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Easy Targets
 wo
letter-writers this month call our attention to the perennial question
of what censors euphemistically refer to as “language.”
Frances Granatino praises Tim Wynne-Jones's analysis of a “language
problem” in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
(see “Letters to the Editor,”
pages 373–374), while Ralph Bertonaschi questions our use
of an expletive in my interview with Maurice Sendak last November.
Questions about what's fit for young eyes and ears
never, ever, go away. (When in 2004 a Doonesbury comic
strip is banned from the Boston Globe because a wounded soldier
says son of a bitch, you know that some things will never
change.) Even as PG movies and family-hour TV — let alone
the wild, wild West of cyberspace — considerably loosen their
corsets on vulgar speech, the printed word, particularly in books
for children, keeps trying to suck it in. Why? Print is hardly first
among equals when it comes to media imbibed by children (which,
in my admittedly unscientific equation, means that while kids will
learn to say the vulgarity du jour, they won't know how to spell
it). Perhaps because we believe that books are “better”
than other media, we hold them to a higher standard, disguising
our disapproval of vulgarity as a defense against “lazy”
language. Y'know, language is often, um, lazy, but why do only certain
words get people, like, exercised?
Or perhaps we only wield the censor's brush or
scissors because, in the case of books, we can. The Traditional
Values Coalition is going to get exactly nowhere with its campaign
against the allegedly transgendered bartender in Shrek 2.
But books for children are susceptible to pressures other than those
of the marketplace, and they're very much like children themselves
in that respect. I often think that the urge to censor is just a
variation on the urge to bully, and the youngest and smallest are
the easiest targets.
|
