Famous books are being re-edited for today's youth

By substituting modern terms for outdated ones, children will no longer be challenged to learn new words...

Farewell to the awful swotters, dirty tinkers and jolly japes: Enid Blyton's language is being dragged out of the 1940s by her publisher in an attempt to give her books greater appeal for today's children.

Starting next month with 10 Famous Five novels, Hodder is "sensitively and carefully" revising Blyton's text after research with children and parents showed that the author's old-fashioned language and dated expressions were preventing young readers from enjoying the stories. The narrative of the novels will remain the same, but expressions such as "mercy me!" have been changed to "oh no!", "fellow" to "old man" and "it's all very peculiar" to "it's all very strange".

Other changes include "housemistress" becoming "teacher", "awful swotter" becoming "bookworm", "mother and father" becoming "mum and dad", "school tunic" becoming "uniform" and Dick's comment that "she must be jolly lonely all by herself" being changed to "she must get lonely all by herself"...

Tony Summerfield, who runs the Enid Blyton Society, said he was "thoroughly against unnecessary changes just for the sake of it, from adults who underestimate the intelligence of children"...

Bestselling children's author Andy Briggs, who is writing a children's series bringing Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan into the 21st century, approved of the changes. "It's an unfortunate necessity," he said. "The classic books we were brought up on – the Famous Five, Tarzan, Sherlock Homes – need to be updated. Language just changes, it evolves, and the problem is if we don't evolve with it, then the new generation of kids is not going to have anything to relate to. When these books were published, 'jeepers' and 'golly gosh' was modern slang. It makes perfect sense to update the language."

I disagree.