Willy Wonka’s Wokery

The publishers of a new edition of Dahl’s books have dragged the children’s classics, kicking and screaming, into the 2020s.

To conform to the wokery and jiggery-pokery of this enlightened decade, gender-neutral terms have been added to the tale of Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe, turning the Oompa-Loompas — a tribe of pygmies who operate Wonkaland — from “small men” into “small people.”

Sensitivity to fat-shaming has mutated Augustus Gloop, a grossly obese boy with a compulsion to eat anything that crosses his path, from “fat” to merely “enormous.”

Hair-trigger racial sensitivities have meant that tractors previously described as “black, brutal-looking monsters” in another book, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, are now referred to as “murderous.”