Aardvark Daily

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When will it end?

The world is changing.

I'm not complaining about change, change is inevitable. Without change we'd be stagnated and unable to advance, either as a species or as individuals. We should embrace change for all the interest and excitement it brings to life.

However, I believe we should not use change as a broad brush to erase our past or our history. It is only by looking back through the eyes of the past that we can judge how well we are progressing.

Sadly, we are now entering an age where "inconvenient" elements of the past are being erased, such that we will not have the ability to compare and contrast in the way we should.

Today, I saw another example of this sad trend.

One of the things that defines us as a culture, as a people and as a society is our literature.

Nowhere is the direction and pace of change more apparent than in the language we use to express ourselves and document our existence.

The lexicon of the contemporary language changes on an almost daily basis, as new words and phrases come into common use, whilst others drop into obscurity. I notice this quite regularly as words I used to use (such as "shant") have been replaced with equivalents (such as "wont").

The vocabulary of a literary work can often make it easy to pick the era from whence it has come (did you see what I did there? :-) so retaining that original prose is essential to preserve the very essence, not only of what is being said but *how* it is being said.

Sadly, there is a movement afoot to contemporise some of the literary classics of the past, so as to remove "offensive" or "challenging" aspects of their vocabulary. Publishers want to eliminate any text that may offend or upset those who are always looking for every opportunity to consider themselves victims.

Today I see that the latest piece of great literature to be assaulted in this manner are the works of P.G. Wodehouse in the form of his fantastic Jeeves and Wooster series of books.

These are very much the product of their time and, as such, provide fertile ground for snowflakes to become outraged at the nomenclature and terminologies used.

According to this report, the Jeeves and Wooster series of books are being edited to remove all potential trigger-points and will also come with warnings for those hypersensitive to the dated dialect presented.

Oh come on... surely a warning would be enough. Is there really a need to remove the very words and phrases that clearly denote the period in history when these books were written?

If some snowflake doesn't want to be offended by reading outdated words and terms then all they need do is not buy the books... surely?

It is the very tone and richness of the words in these books that helps make them the fantastic entertainment they are. To strip that from them would be the equivalent of gelding a breeding stalion so as not to cause offense to those who might get upset at seeing horses copulating in a field.

To these people I would say "Just avert your gaze you fools!".

Right now I bet there are many well regarded and highly respected authors of their day who are turning in their graves as editors and woke publishers destroy their carefully crafted prose in submission to those who demand the right not to be offended.

It won't be long before Shakespeare is in the firing line... believe me!

Why must we accept having many of our great literary works "edited" to be more in line with contemporary standards while we would never even remotely consider allowing the paintings of Rubens to have a bra and panties added to them today so as to preserve the modesty of the models being depicted?

This also raises a very worrying point about our shift to store everything in the cloud and simply stream it on demand...

At least we currently have things such as books and DVDs that allow us to keep our own *original* versions of works that are being attacked and mutilated by the wokersters but What happens when we no longer have our own physical copies of such works?

Will there come a time when valuable and important works from the past are simply re-written without a trace of their original form remaining? How then will we be able to compare that which was with that which is? How will we be able to accurately track the evolution of our culture, our society and our perspectives?

We must be very careful what we delete, lest we destroy our history with it.

I would also wonder why it is that people are being castigated for denying some very unsavoury elements of our history (such as the holocaust) whilst, at the same time, others are actively denying and re-writing other aspects of our history on the basis that it was deplorable in nature.

Who gets to decide what's preserved and what's deleted?

Carpe Diem folks!

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