Expurgation, also known as bowdlerization, is a form of
censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...
that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.
The term ''bowdlerization'' is a pejorative term for the practice, particularly the expurgation of lewd material from books. The term derives from
Thomas Bowdler
Thomas Bowdler, LRCP, FRS (; 11 July 1754 – 24 February 1825) was an English physician known for publishing '' The Family Shakespeare'', an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's plays edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler. Th ...
's 1818 edition of
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
's plays, which he reworked in ways that he felt were more suitable for women and children. He similarly edited
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 173716 January 1794) was an English historian, writer, and member of parliament. His most important work, '' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is ...
's ''
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire''.
A ''fig-leaf edition'' is such a bowdlerized text, deriving from the practice of covering the genitals of nudes in classical and Renaissance statues and paintings with
fig leaves.
Examples
Religious
* In 1264,
Pope Clement IV
Pope Clement IV ( la, Clemens IV; 23 November 1190 – 29 November 1268), born Gui Foucois ( la, Guido Falcodius; french: Guy de Foulques or ') and also known as Guy le Gros (French for "Guy the Fat"; it, Guido il Grosso), was bishop of Le P ...
ordered the
Jews
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...
of
Aragon
Aragon ( , ; Spanish and an, Aragón ; ca, Aragó ) is an autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. In northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces (from north to so ...
to submit their books to
Dominican censors for expurgation.
Sexual
* "
The Crabfish" (known also as "The Sea Crabb"), an English folk song dating back to the mid-1800s about a man who places a crab into a
chamber pot
A chamber pot is a portable toilet, meant for nocturnal use in the bedroom. It was common in many cultures before the advent of indoor plumbing and flushing toilets.
Names and etymology
"Chamber" is an older term for bedroom. The chamber p ...
, unbeknownst to his wife, who later uses the pot without looking, and is attacked by the crab.
Over the years, sanitized versions of the song were released in which a lobster or crab grabs the wife by the nose instead of by the genitals
or that imply the location of the wounds by censoring the rhyming word in the second couplet. For instance, "Children, children, bring the looking glass / Come and see the crayfish that bit your mother's a-face" (arse).
* The 1925
Harvard Press edition of
Montaigne's essays (translated by
George Burnham Ives
George Burnham Ives (1856-1930) was an American bibliographer, editor, and translator.
Early life
He was a member of Salem's Pickering family. Ives was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School.
Career
He became the Assistant Distr ...
) was published without the essays pertaining to sex.
* A
Boston-area ban on
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in sever ...
's novel ''
Oil!'' owing to a short motel sex scene prompted the author to assemble a 150-copy fig-leaf edition with the nine offending pages blacked out as a publicity stunt.
* In 1938, a jazz song "
Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)
"Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)" (also "The Flat Foot Floogee") is a 1938 jazz song, written by Slim Gaillard, Slam Stewart, and Bud Green, and performed by Gaillard and Stewart as Slim & Slam.
"Flat Foot Floogie" was Slim & Slam's first a ...
" peaked at number two on US charts. The original lyrics were sung with the word "floozie", meaning a sexually promiscuous woman, or a prostitute, but record company
Vocalion
Vocalion Records is an American record company and label.
History
The label was founded in 1916 by the Aeolian Company, a maker of pianos and organs, as Aeolian-Vocalion; the company also sold phonographs under the Vocalion name. "Aeolian" was ...
objected. Hence the word was substituted with the almost similar sounding title word "floogie" in the second recording. The "floy floy" in the title was a slang term for a venereal disease, but that was not widely known at the time. In the lyrics it is sung repeatedly "floy-doy", which was widely thought as a nonsense refrain. Since the lyrics were regarded as nonsense the song failed to catch the attention of censors.
* In 1920, an American publisher bowdlerized the George Ergerton translation of
Knut Hamsun's ''
Hunger
In politics, humanitarian aid, and the social sciences, hunger is defined as a condition in which a person does not have the physical or financial capability to eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs for a sustained period. In t ...
.''
*''
Lady Chatterley's Lover'' by English author
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. His best-k ...
. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960.
Racial
* Recent editions of many works—including
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has p ...
's ''
Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry "Huck" Finn is a fictional character created by Mark Twain who first appeared in the book ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' (1876) and is the protagonist and narrator of its sequel, ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1884). He is 12 ...
'' and
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not sp ...
's ''
Nigger of the ''Narcissus''''—have found various replacements ("slave", "Indian", "soldier boy", "N-word", "children") for the word ''
nigger
In the English language, the word ''nigger'' is an ethnic slur used against black people, especially African Americans. Starting in the late 1990s, references to ''nigger'' have been progressively replaced by the euphemism , notably in cas ...
''. An example of bowdlerization can be plainly seen in ''Huck Finn'', in which Twain used racial slurs in natural speech to highlight what he saw as racism and prejudice endemic to the
Antebellum South
In the history of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period (from la, ante bellum, lit= before the war) spanned the end of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. The Antebellum South was characterized by the ...
.
*
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictiona ...
’s ''Ten Little Niggers'' was dramatised by the BBC under the name ''
And Then There Were None
''And Then There Were None'' is a mystery fiction, mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, described by her as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 N ...
''. It was subsequently re-released under this title in the United States, and the short poem which is intrinsic to the plot was changed from ''Ten Little Niggers'' to ''
Ten Little Indians
"Ten Little Indians" is a traditional American children's counting out rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 12976. The term "Indians" in this sense refers to Indigenous North American peoples.
In 1868, songwriter Septimus Winner adapt ...
''.
* The American version of the counting rhyme "
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe", which was changed by some to add the word "nigger",
[I. Opie and P. Opie, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 156-8.] is now sung with a different word, such as "tiger".
Cursing
* Many Internet message boards and forums use automatic
wordfilter
A wordfilter (sometimes referred to as just "filter" or "censor") is a script typically used on Internet forums or chat rooms that automatically scans users' posts or comments as they are submitted and automatically changes or censors particular ...
ing to block offensive words and phrases from being published or automatically amend them to more innocuous substitutes such as
asterisk
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vo ...
s or nonsense. This often catches innocent words, in a scenario referred to as the
Scunthorpe problem
The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise ...
; words such as 'assassinate' and 'classic' may become 'buttbuttinate' or 'clbuttic'. Users frequently self-bowdlerize their own writing by using slight misspellings or variants, such as 'fcuk' or 'pron'.
* The 2010 song
"Fuck You" by
CeeLo Green
Thomas DeCarlo Callaway - Burton (born May 30, 1975), known professionally as CeeLo Green (or Cee Lo Green), is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, record producer and actor. He is known for his work in hip hop and R&B, including the Gnarl ...
, which made the top-10 in thirteen countries, was also broadcast as "Forget You", with a matching music video, where the changed lyrics cannot be lip-read, as insisted by the record company.
Political
*
John Nance Garner
John Nance Garner III (November 22, 1868 – November 7, 1967), known among his contemporaries as "Cactus Jack", was an American Democratic politician and lawyer from Texas who served as the 32nd vice president of the United States under Frank ...
, the 32nd vice president of the United States, famously referred to the vice presidency as "not worth a bucket of warm piss", but this was bowdlerized to "not worth a bucket of warm spit" for many years.
Other
* A student edition of the novel ''
Fahrenheit 451
''Fahrenheit 451'' is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury. Often regarded as one of his best works, ''Fahrenheit 451'' presents an American society where books have been personified and outlawed and "firemen" burn any that ar ...
'' was
expurgated
Expurgation, also known as bowdlerization, is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.
The term ''bowdlerization'' is a pejorative term for the practi ...
to remove a variety of content. This was ironic given the subject matter of the novel involves
burning books. This continued for a dozen years before it was brought to author
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury (; August 22, 1920June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery fictio ...
's attention and he convinced the publisher to reinstate the material.
* The video game ''
South Park: The Fractured But Whole'' was originally going to have the name ''The Butthole of Time''. However, marketers would not promote anything with a vulgarity in its title, so "butthole" was replaced with the homophone "but whole".
See also
* ''
Ad usum Delphini''
* Comstockery, after
Anthony Comstock
*
Censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...
*
Minced oath
A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. An example is "gosh" ...
*
Tobacco bowdlerization
References
{{Censorship
Censorship