COMMENT
The word at issue – and it pains me to assault your ears, dear reader, with such unpleasantness but assault I must – is "slut".
It was withdrawn, apparently, after "comments by a limited number of concerned customers", which appears to mean a single post on the supermarket's Facebook page.
"There is an unacceptable word in it for kids!!! Not OK!" fumed the outraged (and over-punctuated) customer.
Since when did Aldi sell books, anyway? I always thought it was that place you went to buy baked beans and come home instead with a new golf bag and some off-brand breakfast cereal the kids refuse to eat.
But now apparently it's a bookstore, too. And a laughably and stupidly prudish one at that.
Dahl is routinely described as "much-loved" largely because he is ... much loved. And the reason his books like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, James And The Giant Peach and The Twits are so popular is because he is so totally unsentimental. People – especially adults – behave very badly in Dahl's books and characters routinely come to a sticky end (in Augustus Gloop's case, literally). The stories are gloriously gruesome and violent ... and kids adore them because they don't feel patronised.
Dahl's work also demonstrate his fierce intelligence and his passion for language, which brings us to the word slut, which has been excised lest it provoke uproar among the baked bean shoppers of Aldi.
The couplet in Dahl's re-working of Cinderella reads: "The Prince cried, 'Who's this dirty slut?/ Off with her nut! Off with her nut!"
Fully accepting that words can and do change their meaning over time (cf "gay") it's nevertheless clear Dahl is using the word here in its original sense, "a dirty, slovenly woman", according to the Macquarie Dictionary.
Inevitably, this distinction is completely lost on the original complainant and Aldi's Literary Censorship Panel (they have one, right?).
One of the earliest recorded usage of the word is in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a work which presumably also has no chance of making it on to Aldi's shelves.
A few kids books have so far escaped the eagle eye of the supermarket censors. How long they might last before someone complains, however, is anybody's guess.
It can only be a matter of time, for instance, before the animal rights lobby demands the removal of There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.
And the creationists will doubtless be enraged by the inclusion of Pamela Duncan Edwards' provocative work Dinosaur Sleepover.
If only Dahl were still alive to see this absurdity – he'd get a book out of it, for sure.
