I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the ‘Harry Potter’ books.
~ David Sedaris
My Guilty Pleasure
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6 thoughts on “My Guilty Pleasure”
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I’ve always despised the idea of “guilty pleasures”. It mostly means that you’ve almost escaped the brainwashing but not completely so you still need to make an excuse about what you like. I guess that in some cases it’s worth it just to avoid the nonsense explanations as to why your taste is wrong but this probably means you need to change your friends or relatives.
As for Harry Potter, I’ve no problem in the books being changed so colour, etc. are misspelt but as Tom says Sorcerer’s Stone is deeply stupid.
Friends I can manage. I’ve never found any way to change my relatives except to wait for them to die, and if you do that long enough, you run out of relatives.
There are American versions? Why?
The American versions have American spellings and ‘correct’ some of the British idioms, because Scholastic, the American publisher of the books, decided that American children were too stupid to be able to read the original text. For the same reason, they changed the title of the first book to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The original title made a powerful allusion to the practice of magic in ages past, and to its underpinnings in the most advanced knowledge of those times; positing, in effect, an alternate history in which mediaeval magic actually worked, and the pupils at Hogwarts were merely the latest inheritors of that long and grand tradition.
The revised title means nothing, but the word ‘philosopher’ is too hard for American kids, hurr durr durrr.
Brought to you by the gatekeepers of American litracher. Who apparently assume Americans are morons.
It is a well-known maxim of psychology that without special training or insight, human beings are incapable of imagining the operation of any intellect greater than their own. Among foolish and untaught people, this nearly always takes the form of looking at the thought of their intellectual betters and proclaiming: ‘I don’t understand this, so it must be dumb.’
The Gatekeepers of American Litracher, in general, are people of strikingly limited intellectual capacity, and suffer from this tendency to a marked degree. Since they are obviously the most intelligent people in the world, anybody who appears to understand things they do not (such as an allusion to the Philosopher’s Stone, or the fact that children are highly adept at learning new words and most of them enjoy doing it) is obviously stupid.