Expurgation
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(Redirected from Bowdlerized)
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Expurgation is a form of censorship which involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive, usually from an artistic work.
Expurgation of sexual or lewd content is also called bowdlerization, especially for books, after Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
A work that has been subjected to expurgation is sometimes called a fig-leaf edition, a figurative extension from the older practice of placing fig leaves to hide the genitals of nudes in paintings and statues.
[edit] Examples
- In 1264, Clement IV ordered the Jews of Aragon to submit their books to Dominican censors for expurgation.[1]
- Montaigne's Essays translated by George B. Ives was published by Harvard University Press in 1925 without the essays pertaining to sex. Called a fig-leaf edition.[2]
- Oil! by Upton Sinclair: A 150-copy fig-leaf edition was prepared for Boston with nine pages blacked out.[3][4]
- A recent printing of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the racially charged word "nigger" (used over 200 times) was changed to "slave".[5]
- Many Internet message boards and forums use automatic wordfiltering to change offensive words and phrases to more innocuous substitutes. For example, expletives may be replaced with other characters (a series of asterisks is common), or similar-sounding nonsense words.
- Expressions are often bowdlerised by replacing offensive words with inoffensive ones. Examples include the second world war SNAFU, often rendered as "situation normal: all fouled up" instead of the original "fucked up", the use of "sugar" as an expletive instead of "shit", and US use of "rooster" for "cock", and "roach" for "cockroach".
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Popper, William (1889). The Censorship of Hebrew Books. Knickerbocker Press, 13-14.
- ^ Michael C. Bussacco, Heritage Press Sandglass Companion Book: 1960-1983 (Archbald, PA: Tribute Books, 2009), 252, available online, accessed September 23, 2010
- ^ Boston Globe: Jack Curtis, "Blood from oil," February 17, 2008, accessed September 23, 2010
- ^ Mary Craig Sinclair, Southern Belle (NY: Crown Publishers, 1957), 309, available online, accessed September 23, 2010
- ^ Michael Tomasky, "The new Huck Finn" January 7, 2011
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