Previous edited stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald are being released without the content edits. “Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post,” James West, general editor of the Cambridge edition of Fitzgerald’s work, said. He believes the stories make more sense without the tempered language. “One of the commonplaces of Fitzgerald criticism, for decades, has been that he avoided unpleasant topics and realistic language in his magazine fiction. We can see now that this was not altogether his choice.”
If Eskimos have 50 words for snow and 70 words for ice, do they experience these things more richly than the rest of us? Do their words shape their world? John H. McWhorter says not quite. We can think about concepts for which we have no words, and our world isn’t really shaped by our use of language. “…language has only a minor effect on cognition and no effect on a person’s view of the world—that is, in this case, how humans understand time, causality, color, space, and so forth.” Reports about studies that supposedly show the opposing view are exaggerated.
