That's for morons and to make them accessible to people who lack the experience and ability or time to read it in it's proper form. I read the book when I was in fourth grade and I didn't need abridgment, so I don't know who the hell such a hypothetical version would be aimed at. You can't get much between fourth grade and See Spot Run. In any event, this is changing the books to suit the DISTASTE of certain parties for them. Why not go around and change the endings of books to suit the popular mindset while you're at it.

A punch in the mouth is less traumatic than surgery, but one of those is a crime and the other is a service for which considerable payment is offered. Degree is irrelevant, principle is what matters.

Mine wasn't. Guess how I learned the word? Reading "Tom Sawyer", as assigned by my 3rd & 4th grade teacher. I asked my mother what it meant (from the use early in the book I thought it meant a practioner of some obscure sect of supertition), and after her fit of apoplexy, once she ascertained where I learned it, she explained to me the use and context. Or do you think children should learn the word from rap music? The way I learned it made it absolutely certain that I knew how people used it, that it was not a word to use casually, and underscored for me the history of racial injustice by showing that at one time and in some places, it was acceptable to use such a foul term casually.

Maybe the adults shouldn't be such pussy little bitches and expect the world to conform to their sensibilities. What is it the liberals (like the publishing house in question) are always saying when defending pornography and blasphemous "art"? "If it bothers you, don't look at it."

So instead, let's kill what makes it "important" ! That sentence, standing on its own is absolutely correct. In context of the rest of this post and the subsequent statement, it is absolutely backwards.

Doesn't that make the censorship rather pointless then? Anyway, the issue is not simply another abridged version, it is that this is going to purport to be the real thing.

Then what WAS the goal of the book? It seems to me that a significant intent was to illustrate the attitudes, behaviors and speech patterns of certain regions. How does sterilizing it to appease a contemporary fad meet that goal? Why not change all the phonetic-spelled dialects to proper spelling for "ease of reading"? Much of that dialogue was redundant, and is only in the story to show how people talked, so altering that eliminates that aspect of the story and leaves you with a lot of people talking unnecessarily.

Also, removing the words undercuts the effect of their use. When Huck confesses the difficulty in lowering himself to apologize to a slave, the impression is one of socio-economic seperation. If he says "black man" it becomes clinical and detached and an objective self-assessment, rather than conveying how he felt. Only by leaving in the word nigger do we get the connotation of superiority and how it clashes with what he knows to be right and wrong and how Jim is shafted by the whole society and how that same culture has made doing the right thing difficult for Huck. The latter, however, is what the author intended.