• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

CLEANING UP HUCK

As the year 2011 began, however, Twain’s book became the center of another type of controversy stemming from his use of the word nigger 219 times in the book. The racial issue came up like thunder when it became public that Alan Gribben, a language professor at Auburn University in Alabama, had decided that each word should be replaced by the word slave in a new edition, even though the slave in the book had been freed.

Gribben explained that the n-word had become so explosive at a time of growing political correctness that the book might become one that people praise but don’t read. “It’s such a shame,” he told the Associated Press, “that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers.”25

The news story set off a national debate over whether the much-read literary classic should be changed after so many years. Most critics said Twain himself would have objected. He once wrote, “The difference between the almost-right word and the right word . . . is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

But Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert supported the idea of whitewashing American history and suggested that the job had only begun. “It’s great to have the n-word out of Huckleberry Finn. Now get to work on the Moby D-word.”

Except for his joking response, it looked like another example of the language filter starting to work, this time not on common obscenities but on the use of overtly racial terms. As this is written, not all the votes are in, but the Amglish system of allowing the public to make the ultimate decision on controversial language seems to be working, though often slowly and erratically.

This chapter has described some of the pioneers who helped create the informal language that is replacing formal English in the United States. The next chapter will describe how the new American lingo has spread around the world.

The New World Lingo

GO OUT MUBARAK

—Words on a man’s forehead in Tahrir Square, Cairo, February 8, 2011

This crudely crayoned message in Cairo’s Tahrir Square is only one of many examples of the informal English penetrating the rest of the world. Such signs are part of a growing strategy by people in other countries to solicit international support for their causes by getting news microphones and cameras to pick up their crudely framed English words and convey them to the centers of world power.

Also illustrative of the U.S. influence in the Arab uprisings in 2011 was the central role played by American-based social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The spark that lit the populist fires in Egypt was a graphic photo on Facebook of the distorted face of an Egyptian man beaten to death by police. When it became public on February 8 that the man who posted the photo online was Wael Ghonim, the Middle East manager of Google, the news brought out the largest crowd in Egyptian history to honor him.

These words and photos on the Internet were additional proof, if any were needed, of the worldwide influence of American language and pop culture. According to the Voice of America, there were 5 million users of Facebook in Egypt when the public demonstrations began there on January 25.

Five years earlier, Amglish had already penetrated the very birthplace of English so thoroughly that the nation’s soccer superstar David Beckham blurted out the following words about his children: “The homework is so hard these days. It’s totally done differently to what I was teached . . . and you know, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this.”1 The new lingo had obviously gotten in too deep for him or anyone else to kick the habit.

Normally, Brits don’t like to play second fiddle to their former colonies, but when it comes to keeping current with the latest patter from across the pond, they are obviously turning out to be little more than lapdogs in bulldog drag.

BLAME THE YANKS

For centuries, American slang has invaded the rest of the world with its jaunty words and phrases, with the likes of