By The FirstThe publisher behind children’s author Roald Dahl has edited key words to omit “offensive language” from the writer’s classic novels.
Words banned now include “fat, bald, and ugly.”
Key characters like the Oompa Loompas featured in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ are now “gender neutral.”
“It’s not unusual to review the language,” explained Puffin Publisher.
From The Guardian UK:
In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
