Languages change. Moron, idiot and imbecile used to be medical terms. Gay used to simply mean happy and excited. A fag used to be a term for a cigarette.

I really doubt it would have appeared in a mainstream children's book if it were seen as at all offensive.

Words like "bugger" and "damn" used to be extremely offensive curses. Now they're often used as very mild expressions of annoyance to avoid using the serious ones.

I mean... there's also a famous Agatha Christie's book that used to have the N-word in its title.

We're viewing these things with our modern eyes. But they didn't have this kind of sensibility those days. It probably felt like using any other word: normal.

I wonder if our grandchildren will feel the same way about something we say normally today.

I mean it is from 1951. I've seen a lot worse by people who meant it.

It's 4 years before Emmett Till was murdered for example.

It was England, which never treated the n-world quite like those ungrateful colonials.

I doubt whether the vast majority of British readers would’ve been jolted by it - at the time of first publication. It was a word that had been in everyday parlance that got attached to dark “things” as a describer.

Here’s the thing though, go forward maybe 15 years again and you have the 1964 Smethwick constituency election. The winner had a, uhh, memorable slogan: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”

It’s worth noting that the “n*****s” in question were, most likely, gonna be from the Punjab. Go figure.

So, yeah, in less than a generation the word in question went from everyday speech with no overt pejorative meaning to the explicitly racist word it is today. It morphed.

I wonder if Carlin ever tried sneaking that past the censors.