Let’s not forget that unfortunate Spongebob scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNsWbK4OkZw
Both boomer and gen-z pearlclutchers seem to be equally oblivious in their own ways to the fact that language changes.
language use is gay.
no homo.
Pretty sure 75 years is prior to the other three existing, so Thomas & Friends has technically gone longer without dropping an N-bomb.
@snooggums @The_Picard_Maneuver this is in fact correct. Sesame Street started in the 60s
yeah but barney’s a dinosaur. he’s at least three point something gajillion years old.
We do not talk about what Barney was doing during the 1940s.
wait what was Barney doing in the 1940s
My extensive research has pointed directly to a high likelihood that Barney would likely have farted at least once. The evidence is rather damning.
He was chilling with the Minions.
“NOT THE MAMA!”
Baby was much funnier than that purple POS.
also turned very purple, so maybe lack of oxygen made him an idiot?
He’s actually a gojira but you were close
Context: https://www.scribd.com/document/899239966/Henry-the-Green-Engine-1951-Scanned-by-ThatERTLGuy#page=64 page 60 of the book, 64 of the document.
Written version in case someone doesn’t want to click on random links:
The Guard’s flag waved, his whistle blew, and they were off. Soon in the distance they saw the bridge. There were the boys and they all had stones. “Are you ready, Henry?” said this Driver. “Sneeze hard when I tell you.” “Now!” he said, and turned the handle. “Atisha Atisha Atishooooooh!” Smoke and steam and ashes spouted from his funnel. They went all over the bridge, and all over the boys who ran away as black as ####.
fuck censorship. historical context is important when referencing historical facts. society must be reminded of why language like this is no longer acceptable in order to keep it unacceptable, lest we forget.
Isn’t it “lest”? Not a native speaker so I don’t really know.
huh, so it is.
I always thought it was spelled the same just said differently similar to read(red) and read(reed).
JFC
he doesn’t even look sorry
Henry wasn’t sorry, it was on purpose. He was celebrated. I have read the entirety of The Railway Series to my daughter twice (I do substitute in “coal” for the aforementioned slur). There is some crazy shit in there. Engine body horror.
“Hey baby, wanna hear a slur?”
“shitwhistle” (it’s a slur among sentient trains)
You hear that, Bobandy? That shrill sound in the distance? That’s a shitwhistle heralding the arrival of the shit train. Carrying countless shitcars each filled with tons and tons of shitcargo. Should be here any moment, Bobandy, but first a little drinky poo!
He knew
The boys were ready with stones to throw at the locomotive.
My god this was probably a real problem in 19th/early 20th century England though. Fucking kids can be fucking assholes lol
Every story in the books was based on an actual event.
That’s no reason to throw the gamer word at them. Actually, it’s more messed up because it was a bunch of lily white English kids chucking rocks. Should’ve called them crackers as he passed instead.
Fucking chavs
All this means is that the Thomas franchise has existed long enough to be publishing books since when that word was still in common parlance. I’m sure if you looked at anything from that era, it wouldn’t take long to find something that appears problematic through a modern lens.
Believe it or not, it was not “normal” to use slurs in children’s books in 1952.
There are Marvel comics from the 1940’s with characters straight out of ministrel shows and they still don’t use the word. Would you like to guess why?
Edit: not that it stopped Dr Seuss a couple times in the 30’s, mind you, but he reserved it for comics and not his children’s books, those only got racist caricatures.
Believe it or not, it was not “normal” to use slurs in children’s books in 1952.
It heavily depends which books you look in.
The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.
Sure, absolutely no history of slavery and colonialism in the UK. There definitely aren’t a dozen Kipling stories where he calls anyone not a WASP by the term.
While Britain participated in the slave trade, they went out of their way to not do so in Britain; the slaveholders kept their slaves abroad and out of sight, in places where the laws of civilisation which rule such institutions to be obscene are waived. (Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were one such place.) And it was impolite to inquire too hard about the sources of fortunes that built stately homes.
The difference being that when the N-word was uttered in Britain, it was belittling and condescending in an exoticising way, like a colonial-era picture book of funny foreigners in their traditional costumes. In America, however, it had a more immediate edge of aggression and violence, implying an other that’s here rather than far away, and firmly below the speaker in the established racial hierarchy, and who must be kept there using tools including designating them as a (N-word).
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The garbage eurotrash will spread to pretend they aren’t and haven’t been virulent racists is pretty amazing.
IT’s eXotiCisiNg NoT a ToOl oF oUr RacIaL ImpEriAl HeiRARchY
Meanwhile, at the absolute kindest Br*tish imperial racists are being:
You’re bringing up fucking Kipling of all people, the one poet everyone knows for being mega into colonialism. That’s like me pointing at the Grateful Dead while saying Americans need to lay off the acid.
One of England’s favorite poets until explicit racism (in public) was no longer de rigueur.
He’s a perfectly valid example of the feelings of the nation at that time.
Are you fucking stupid?
They really are delusional.
The denial and defense of their racist antics is amazing to see in real time.
Those were exceedingly good stories though!
I just checked my copy of the book. Even though it was first published in 1939, my copy was still published under the original titlein 1963.
It was altered in the 70s, around the same time the Thomas book was altered.
Well, now I am going to have to go home and check my copy of Thomas. Because I totally remember that line.
Setting aside the incorrect notion that there weren’t black people in England until the 50s, the story in question was published in 1951 and remained in print into the 1970s.
“relatevily uncommon” != “there weren’t”
Yes, and Black soldiers took part in D-Day seven years prior.
pretty sure that racism in the days of yore was still racist (please remember who decided what was appropriate in common parlance back then)
And nobody denied that. The statement was “racism was normal in those days”, and not “the n-word wasn’t racist in those days”.
You’re not allowed to criticize or point out Southern Klans members because it was the style of the time.
Lemmy’s just becoming worse and worse these days.
Again, nobody said that. You keep just making shit up.
…are you okay? automatically assuming the worst possible meaning of ambiguous statements doesn’t seem healthy.
what about this: “pointing the klansmen out to people back then was harder because the average person was more racist.”
I grow more and more tired of humanity being a constant idiot parade but that’s nothing new.
“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
or, of course, it could be that you’re just so much better than everyone else, right?
Just because you refuse to understand that acceptance of a word, no matter how foul, was entirely dependant on the region it was used doesn’t mean Lemmy or anyone else is accepting it. People here just understand that Britain in the 1950s was far different in cultural acceptance than the US in 1950.
Just like the USA using “That’s gay” as a casual insult as late as the mid 2000s is now considered inappropriate today. I’m queer and I know Brits who still say “pass me a fag”. Guess who isn’t upset about hearing that because I’m not a moron.
they do say that if you always expect the worst you’re never disappointed… but it definitely won’t make you happy.
There are things in the world to legitimately be outraged about if you want to be outraged. You don’t need to force yourself to be angry at shit like this.
the hays code didn’t apply to colloquial speech, it applied to movies.
The Hayes Code didn’t apply to books at all, it was movie specific. I assumed they were talking about the dominant culture at the time.
it just cracks me up because if you look for Hays violating shit, it’s everywhere back then. If they wanted to sing about sex, they sang about food.
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See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None (Agatha Christie, 1939)
Don’t even get started with Tintin.
I don’t think Tintin is publishing anything today… Or recently. Not anything new, anyways.
So, are George Carlin and Ringo Starr racists?! /s
Probably, they grew up in a time when it was harder to know better but it’s still racism when most of society does it.
(75 years i.e. 1951)
I convinced a girl to watch “Battle Of Briton (1969)” with me one time. I forgot to warn her about the dog. She was shocked to say the least.
Does the Nword have the same cultural significance in the UK?
You’re thinking of Dambusters.
And it was still derogatory, but not as weaponised as the US. More like how they used the lesser N word.
wtf is the lesser N word can we just write them in quotes? It’s not like Voldemort.
Looks over shoulder
Whispers: “numpty”
Runs away
Lmao that sounds like a python library
Ooh, so close. There is a NumPy lib.
Oh god, worse than I could possible have imagined D:
Yeah this always irks me about english/the anglosphere, people act like mentioning a word is the same as directing it at someone as an insult
It’s hammered into a lot of people’s heads that the word is very mean, and not just “insult” but “remember, people like you used to be considered animals and treated like property, subject to difficult to fathom attrocities”.
It doesn’t need to be directed to be a reminder. While reference is likewise a reminder, it’s at least couched in terms that convey the speaker understands it has weight beyond “insult”.
Couple that with saying it as a white person can carry significant reputation damage.Since these lessons are usually imparted in childhood implicitly, and it doesn’t come up often enough to drive introspection for most people, it just lingers as “don’t say words that hurt people and make everyone dislike you”.
Candyman candyman candyman lol.
They still use “bugger” in the UK, which is basically the same thing but for gay people.
For years I thought “bugger” just means “to annoy” or something like that, so I would say things like “This buggers me” or “You don’t have to get so buggered about it.”
Boy am I embarrassed…
Once I used it like that at work, everyone was surprised, and so I looked it up after. I’m actually dead now. This is my ghost typing.
Kind of? Like you could call a child a “little bugger” and that would just be calling them annoying rather than an arse fucker
Well, there was one episode of South Park about people who annoy you…
I’ve never encountered that word used with a homophobic intent, as far as I could tell. If you wanted to express that thought in my youth, other words beginning with B would be far more common. Naturally I found them as odious then as I would now.
Doesn’t matter, the word is rooted in homophobic intent.
So is “gay”. Language evolves. Being a linguistic originalist would be a hard and eccentric hill to die on.
Being a linguistic originalist would be a hard and eccentric hill to die on.
Well good I’m glad the UK has abandoned that principle, it was getting a bit pretentious.
Okay, I need more context to this. N-word in any of these franchises feels something so far off.
Boys on a bridge threw rocks at a train, smashing windows. Next time the train made sure to cover them in soot so they were “black as n—“.
And here I thought George Carlin was the hardest Thomas ever went. Turns out he used to roll coal on hooligans 🤣
The TV adaptation definitely glosses things over. For instance, in the show Henry has a big crash and is sent to England to be repaired. In the canon of the books, he was scrapped and swapped out for a better locomotive, who was then given the same name.
They also punish a locomotive by sealing it behind a brick wall. Considering those things are sentient and basically immortal that’s some new levels of fucked up.
That was also Henry I. The whipping boy of Sodor.
They really hate that one guy eh?
No, he’s sent to Crewe for a rebuild and returns with a new shape - mostly changes to his firebox iirc as he’s been struggling to build up enough steam with anything other than high-quality (expensive) Welsh coal.
Source: literally re-read the relevant book over the weekend.
The canonical history book The Island of Sodor expands on this:
Since 1922 there have been two Henrys…
We never saw Henry I, but we talked to men who had crewed him. Henry I had a superficial likeness to Gordon, they said, but that was as far as it went. They remembered hearing rumours of a scandal at Doncaster in 1919 or thereabouts, about the theft of some drawings. Nothing was proved, but it was alleged that a Locomotive Builder with a grudge against Gresley had engineered a “leak” so as to steal a march on him. His spy, however, blundered and took the wrong drawings. The mistake was discovered too late. The locomotive when built, showed so many faults that the builder was glad of chance to unload his “white elephant” on to a desperate customer.
No-one was better pleased than Topham Hatt when the Killdane accident occurred in 1935. At last he had an opportunity of having Henry completely rebuilt at Crewe.
It has been a mystery to many that Topham Hatt was able to send the deplorable Henry I to Crewe in 1935, and receive back a Stanier Class SMT in tip-top condition as Henry II.
So as Henry I was a bootleg Gresley and then a Stanier Black 5, they are two different engines.
I really respect your answer, but surely The Island of Sodor should be considered a separate canon rather than more canonical than The Railway Series? I don’t have a copy, given it’s sadly been out of print for around 40 years, but does it include things like talking, sentient, opinionated steam engines? ;)
Henry the Green Engine reads:
Then I expect you were sorry for Henry who was often ill and unable to work. He gave Sir Topham Hatt (who is, of course, our Fat Controller) a lot of worry. Now Henry has a new shape and is ready for anything. These stories tell you all about it.
“Cheer up, Henry! It wasn’t your fault. Ice and snow caused the accident. I’m sending you to Crewe, a fine place for sick engines. They’ll give you a new shape and a larger firebox. Then you’ll feel a different engine, and won’t need special coal any more. Won’t that be nice?” “Yes, sir,” said Henry doubtfully.
Henry liked being at Crewe, but was glad to come home.
He is clearly the same Henry in terms of personality and memories, post-rebuild, even if he has miraculously morphed into a Black 5. If The Island of Sodor takes a more realistic approach, that’s fine, but even your quote says “rebuilt” instead of “scrapped”.
That Thomas-as-the-ship-of-Theseus meme that did the rounds on Lemmy the other week springs to mind…
The Island of Sodor was intended to be fully canon, as a sourcebook for parents reading to children who wanted more detailed information about the world of the books in order to answer questions. It’s just more in-depth.
You can think of it as the Railway Series being the simplified ELI5 version, and TIS being the “real” version. For instance, the RS only mentions Sir Topham Hatt, without the clarification given in TIS that this relates to a father or his son depending on in which period of Sodor’s history the story is set.
Some youths were throwing rocks at trains going under a bridge, so one of the engines purged soot from its chimney as it went under the bridge as revenge, covering the youths in sticky black stuff.
That word was unfortunately rather common in the past:
What the filter is that?
I thought vertical videos and word by word transcripts was aweful, now they add shitty filters?
Forreal, this clip is completely unwatchable. I took psychic damage ticks for every second I look at that garbage
They’ve been doing that for a while to work around copyright claims. And as someone with less than perfect hearing, I always appreciate transcripts/subtitles.
I love subtitles, just not the word-by-word ones. Give me full phrases dammit!
