Only later when reading the book to my kids did I notice the fine print at the bottom of the cover: formerly published as “Thomas Tells a Lie.”According to Publisher's Weekly, this is a popular title in Random House's Golden Books series for young children, one that sold over 137,000 copies last year. Not bad for a decades-old book, but why did they change the title?
In the story, the railroad boss orders his famous little tank engine to check the safety signals on a branch line, but Thomas gets distracted by a carnival and forgets to finish the job. He lies to the boss, says he checked the whole line, but later that night another train partially derails because of a faulty signal.
Does Thomas break a promise, or does he tell a lie? He does both, but the heart of the story is him telling a lie. Did some marketing wizard at Random House deem the idea of a lie too strong for young children?
I know about being sensitive to what a child can bear. I got tired of reading simple-minded stuff to lull my kids to sleep, decided that they really were only listening to the sound of my voice, so I started reading Homer's Iliad. That was going OK, but when I came to a part about a sword-strike to the neck and the poor soldier's nose and mouth hitting the dust before his knees crumpled… well, I thought I could skip that part, even if my kids didn't really understand the story.
This week I was researching the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and I clicked on a 2008 podcast about corruption. A bank official spoke of a survey that disclosed lessening perceptions of corruption and said the results proved that corruption is variable. He said the most important factor in combating corruption is political will. I found his take on the topic slightly interesting, but I especially noticed that the EBRD man would not say the word “bribe” -- he insisted on saying “facilitation payments” or “corruption payments.”
These EBRD euphemisms led me to Thomas Bowdler, whose name has been made a word for literary censorship: to bowdlerize. Bowdler edited Shakespeare's plays to make them more suitable for family reading, softening the rough edges here and there; for example, making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet an accidental drowning.
Bowdler's father had read Shakespeare to his family, and only as he worked on his own project did Thomas realize that his father had been omitting or changing parts of the plays to make them more suitable for his wife and children. The realization spurred his work to make an edition of Shakespeare that would be useful for a family whose father was not such a “circumspect and judicious” reader. The book-buying public approved of Bowdler's idea, for his “Family Shakespeare” of 1807 sold well and a later version had 11 editions printed by the middle of the century.
Here we are two centuries on, and people are still uncomfortable with words. And we in Turkey get so upset that we prosecute writers. According to a report issued earlier this month by BIA Media Monitoring, 125 people in Turkey were prosecuted for their opinions in the second quarter of 2009. Some 57 of those prosecuted were journalists, and most of the total 80 cases involved the “Kurdish question.”
This is quite a coincidence, for after having been spooked by Homer's graphic descriptions of battle, I decided to soften my kids' bedtime reading: I would teach them all about the Kurdish issue. To make the story safe, instead of Kurdish I use the word spinach, and I change the prime minister to Peter Rabbit, and make Öcalan into Farmer MacGregor. I promised my kids not to disclose the characters assumed by the opposition leaders, but I can say that they both have pink noses. Did I break a promise?
