The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Anthony Horowitz’s new novel, The Power of Five: Necropolis (Walker Books) is out on 30th October.

Twit for twat

28.08.08

What is the difference between a twat and a twit? Quite a lot, it would seem, to the folk at Random House who have agreed to reprint future editions of Jacqueline Wilson’s novel My Sister Jodie replacing one with the other. A twit, of course, is a 1930s word meaning a foolish person and is perhaps derived from nitwit. A twat, on the other hand, is altogether nastier, although it appears in a poem by Robert Browning, who mistakenly believed it was a type of hat. In fact, well . . . it’s the vulva, isn’t it? It’s unclear how it became a term of abuse.

Anyway, 55-year-old housewife Anne Dixon took on the combined might of a leading publisher and a bestselling children’s author (according to the Daily Mail) and won. “The book is clearly for children,” Dixon said. “They should not have to be subjected to trash and vulgarity.”

The Mail also accused Dame Jacqueline of trash and vulgarity earlier this year. A piece by Winifred Robinson drew our attention to Love Lessons, in which a 14-year-old snogs her teacher. And Girls in Tears with its scenes of binge drinking and vomiting. Mrs Dixon might have known, therefore, what to expect. But it wasn’t this that offended her. It was just one word.

Why does “bad language” still have such a power to offend when children of every class and culture use it so often, it has become virtually meaningless? Take the word “fuck”, for example. It must be one of the most commonly used words in the English language.

And why is offending people such a crime? Three people complained about the t-word, as it must now be known—out of the 150,000 who bought the book. And come to think of it, how did nine-year-old Even Coulson even know what it meant unless great aunt Anne explained it to her? Couldn’t she have said it was a type of mushroom or something and moved on?

There’s a serious point here. Wilson owes her success to the way she has captured a generation of adolescent girls with razor-sharp precision: their thoughts, their morality, their language. She is in every sense the voice of a generation. Changing one word may be a tiny step but it’s still a step in the wrong direction. How long will it be before whole books are rewritten or censored simply because some publisher fears they might give offence? Actually, it’s already happened. The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones has been axed for exactly that reason. And here’s a funny thing—that was Random House, too.

Comments on this article