Kind of a travesty. It's nothing these kids wouldn't hear on the school bus every day.
If the original text hadn't had him swearing, would you have walked away thinking "Gee, that was nice, but it seems odd that he never said 'fuck'. I'll remove half a star from my rating for that'? If not, why is this edit in any way a negative, let alone a travesty?
(I have essentially the same rant about alcohol and high schoolers).
If the parents and other authority figures in the child's life aren't already providing good models of social behavior, then the kid's got bigger problems to worry about than the rough language in the book, and if they do have good models, then I don't see the problem, as long as the context gets explained to them at some point.
How about their parents? Should we change every book out there so it can be a children's role model now?
I would prefer my kids not have a teacher that talks that way. I think a majority of parents would not appreciate that.
(Although I feel like this I would support a teacher who chose to use the uncensored version of The Martian in school. )
The second one gets the same message across in my opinion, but without resorting to obscene language.
Now imagine a professor saying that during a lecture; sounds even worse to be honest. You mentioned that you grew up in a foreign country. Is it normal to hear your professor or boss speaking like that in a professional setting?
Same denotation, different connotation and emotional content (assuming both sentences are spoken by the same person). There are people at my work from whom the first example is heard daily, and people for whom it would be severely out of character.
> Is it normal to hear your professor or boss speaking like that in a professional setting?
Only one or two of my professors, out of a couple dozen, but probably 3 of the 5 bosses I've worked under would occasionally use that kind of language.
Now, I can agree with you if you're talking about using curse words just as a standard course of business. They are words with meaning just like all other words. Use them to convey what you are actually trying to convey.
But actually even in my current corporate business application development job there's a healthy amount of swearing within the department, even from the boss. We don't use it when communicating with people outside the department though (well, usually).