bowdlerize
verb

- to remove words or parts from a book, play, or film that are considered to be unsuitable or offensive

Cambridge Dictionary

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ORIGIN

Thomas Bowdler was an English doctor and philanthropist. In 1807, he published The Family Shakspeare, with adapted versions of the famous works that he felt were more appropriate for the 19th century.

Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, removed or changed words, expressions and passages they thought might offend the sensibilities of the day. Unfortunately, taking out the “naughty bits” makes many texts weaker and their words less effective.

Bowdlerization is similar to censorship, but bowdlerizing tends to rewrite texts or to clean up scenes that are considered vulgar rather than remove them completely from literature, films or television shows. Also, censorship tends to come from an authority and have a more political intention.

Some people consider “politically correct” language a modern day form of bowdlerisation.

One example is when texts are rewritten to replace “he/his” with gender-neutral “they/their”, even at the cost of grammatical accuracy., as in “I think someone left their notebook in the conference room”.

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SYNONYMS

abridge, ban, black out, bleach, censure, clean up, cut, delete, edit, excise, expurgate, launder, purge, purify, repress, sanitise, scissor out, squelch, sterilise, strike out, suppress, whitewash

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Practice OWAD in an English conversation, say something like:

“They were forced to BOWDLERIZE their blog post after some readers complained about the use of 'vulgar' vocabulary.”

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A shout-out to Florian for suggesting today’s word,…

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Paul Smith