To think this attitude to names like Fanny in old books is silly?

[Carla786]

I've seen posts here agreeing with the new Enid Blyton editions that changed Fanny to Franny and Dick to Rick, some even saying she must have meant it as a double entendre.

 Just seems silly & narrow-minded to me. Not everything was always meant as a double entendre. Should Fanny Price in Mansfield Park also be changed? Or other characters called names that mean different things now? 

I remember my mother passed down a minor Blyton book with a kitten called Bimbo in. Was that Blyton being rude, or just due to the fact that Bimbo was slang for 'kid' then?

If we are to start tidying up names that cause sniggering, can someone please do something about Humpy-Rumpy in Road Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile?

If a few name changes make stories accessible to new generations then I say go for it. But frankly, I have bigger issues with Enid Blyton than the names she gave the vile children she created!

Things like that drive me insane!

‘Filth’

I think you’re the problem here.

You said yourself it's wrong to change books written in the past but actually started with slagging off little black sambo and hunting .
For starters it was a childhood classic. And fox hunting has been a tradition in this country for centuries before being banned. It's always featured in historical novels. Make your mind up!

I think Darrell Rivers was very much Enid Blyton's tribute to her husband - with her surgeon father who was basically Darrell Waters. If you compare the way Malory Towers is structured with St Clare's, MT is very much Darrell's story all through whereas St Clare's drifts away from its original main characters, the twins, who only feature peripherally in the latter half of the series - I think EB created Darrell in honour of her new husband and MT was a way of playing that out. So, in short, she had to be named after him.

This.

I mean, it’s a reminder that EB was an absolute monster in how she led her personal life. She had endless affairs, including with her daughters’ nanny, and when her first husband wanted a divorce, she worried that her infidelity would impact her professional reputation and, despite agreeing with him that if he allowed her to divorce him for infidelity she would facilitate him having an ongoing relationship with their daughters, in fact refused to let him see them, immediately changed their surname to Darrell Waters, and ensured that he never worked in publishing again, meaning he became bankrupt.

I did not say little black sambo should be re written. I said it simply would not be published today. Which is an accurate assessment.

He was. They called him Fatty because he was fat. The initials were a jokey coincidence. In the first book it's mentioned that at boarding school he had other nicknames related to his weight.

That wasn't until the later books. In the first book Fatty, Larry and Pip were 12. Daisy was 11 and Bets was eight.
The disguises started around book 3 and adult disguises even later after Fatty's voice broke.
I know these books really well lol

Pp made clear she wasn't saying it should be changed.
I think it's fair to differentiate between books with racist imagery/language and books with language that now is seen (by some!) as overwhelmingly innuendo-laden but wasn't back then. I mean, I don't think 'sambo' was ever seen as a polite term for black people the way some words were which have since shifted (eg. 'Coloured' was once seen as polite, eg. NAACP, but is not now). If it had been, that would be a better parallel.

Good to see another fan!

We had a cat called Bimbo which my sister named after the Bimbo and Topsy book. My mum tried to change it to 'Bilbo' when the word came to have different connotations, but the cat was having none of it!

Thank for the info. Tragic that the marriage started with her writing a tribute but ended with her treating him so badly.

I disagree that sambo was ever considered an impolite term back in those days: it was fairly routine along with all the other "now dubious" words in noddy, rupert, etc - in my view it was only later on that people ever started to use it with hateful intent and only once that intent becomes associated with the word does the world deem such words unusable

That's awful, jesus christ as if you all weren't going through enough that she had to use a non personal name for your dad, what a self centred cow

Sambo was never, ever a polite term for a Black person (or indeed, a Southern Indian person, as in the original story). The story has often included illustrations depicting derogatory stereotypes, which have been criticised for a century or more.

Updated version of Little Black Sambo here - Little Babaji

It does but I'm American living in the US and I can't remember the last time I heard someone actually use this word. The early '90s? It sounds very quaint and dated to my ear. Most people just say butt. Even when it was in more common use, it was very, very mild. I can't imagine anyone but a few whacko extremists getting upset about it now.

This is the crux. The story is not about a Black person & the plot shows Babaji (the version I grew up with) as smart and sympathetic. But back from Langston Hughes and others, the illustrations were criticised for the exact reason you said. Arguably they were the main problem.

https://arloriverrex.com/were-noddy-and-rupert-bear-racist/#:~:text=The%20controversy%20stems%20from%20a,example%20is%20just%20not%20acceptable.
Rupert : again I think the illustrations are the issue. If you look at this part, Koko is treated like any other character in the dialogue. The issue is the illustration which uses the golliwog style.

YANBU. By the logic of these folk, The Owl and the Pussycat is x-rated filth

As the ad said 'Only the balls should bounce'.

To answer the Buddy question, it was one I only came across a couple of years ago via a work friend - according to her partner (who I think is from the Caribbean area) buddy is a slang word for penis in that part of the world.

You have remembered correctly! I was younger than 9, but that Matilda quote happened to be the first time I came across the word fanny and I can remember Mum telling me off for repeating the quote.

We need the laugh emoji back..