Today I read yet another example of censorship that made me quite sad. In order to make the world a better place, some upstanding citizens decided to expunge an awful word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s not that the offensive word “nigger” will be changed to the dubiously better word “slave” but that there are people actually asking for it and buying censored history from a publisher. It’s all the nuances of history that allow us to understand it. If we expunge the offensive bits of history from our collective memories, we only doom ourselves to repeat it. I hate the word but value the lesson its use teaches us. So did Samuel Clemens.

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