bowdlerisation

plural bowdlerisations · alternative Bowdlerization · alternative bowdlerization · alternative Bowdlerisation

1. countableuncountableThe action or instance of bowdlerising; the omission or removal of material considered vulgar or indecent.

   Synonyms: expurgation

plural Bowdlerisations

1. countableuncountableAlternative letter-case form of bowdlerisation.

   Simply on aesthetic grounds I can almost applaud the Victorians’ fig obsessed Bowdlerisation of Greek and Roman statuary.

   2012, Ruth Ramsden, chapter 9, in Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot, London: Cutting Edge Press, →ISBN, page 137

   5 more examples

   Her eighty-seven songs appeared first under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Bogan of Bogan’ or ‘B.B.’ in The Scottish Minstrel (1821–24), and posthumously as Lays from Strathearn. Not a few of them are mere Bowdlerisations of ‘indelicate’ favourites; but four at least live, and shall live, with the airs to which they are wedded—the exquisite ‘Land o’ the Leal’ (c. 1798), and ‘Caller Herrin’,’ ‘The Laird o’ Cockpen,’ and ‘The Auld House.’

   1891, “Nairne, Carolina Oliphant, Baroness”, in Chambers’s Encyclopædia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, volume VII (Maltebrun to Pearson), London; Edinburgh: William & Robert Chambers, Limited; Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott Company, page 377, column 2

   In “The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth” (The Bodley Head; 16s.), Mr. Chamberlin deals very faithfully with a scandal that has nothing to do with sixteenth-century gossip about the Queen’s morals. It is a purely academic outrage: Froude’s Bowdlerisations of Gloriana’s good things, which the historian paraphrased loosely when he should have transcribed them accurately.

   1924 February 23, J[ames] D[avid] Symon, “Books of the Day”, in The Illustrated London News, London: The Illustrated London News and Sketch, Ltd., page 321, column 1

   We began to debunk, with the aid of such Bowdlerisations of Freud as now trickled though, human motive, and learned to diagnose our mental discomforts as repressions and inhibitions—an accomplishment which gave me a good deal of relief.

   1955, Phyllis Bentley, “Post-war”, in Noble in Reason, Bath: Cedric Chivers Ltd, published 1972, →ISBN, page 159

   There does not, up to now, exist any Talmud edition free from frequent blunders of copyists or from interpolations, Bowdlerisations and misunderstandings.

   1965 September 17, Otto Wolfgang, “Christianity Did Not Arise in Palestine”, in The Freethinker, volume LXXXV, number 38, London: G. W. Foote and Company, page 299, column 1

   Tomas Bowdler, MD (1754–1825), published his Family Shakespeare in 1818. It was an “expurgated edition”. He went on, perhaps less influentially, to remove all sexual references from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lewis and his colleagues suggest a similar semantic purification of the psychiatric literature, but their Bowdlerisations are neither consistent nor a profitable solution.

   1990 November, B. Dolan, C. Evans, “The Bowdlerisation of psychiatry”, in The British Journal of Psychiatry, volume 157, London: The Royal College of Psychiatrists, →ISSN, page 936, column 2