Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Expurgation of offensive or indelicate passages or words from an edited book or writing.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun the deletion of all passages considered to be indecent.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The action or instance of
bowdlerizing ; theomission orremoval of material consideredvulgar orindecent .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the act of deleting or modifying all passages considered to be indecent
- noun written material that has been bowdlerized
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Reuters spoke to Google, and the company responded in a statement that the enforced bowdlerization was indeed intentional:
Nexus One @%&#! Censors Voice-To-Text Messages - The Consumerist 2010
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For this bowdlerization of the folk tradition -- deeply disrespectful to the people who created it, I may add -- Pete the tireless popularizer of fake folk music bears much of the blame.
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How coincidental that the Tate imbroglio should have taken place barely more than a month after the brouhaha stirred by the Yale University Press's bowdlerization of Jytte Klausen's book, "The Cartoons That Shook The World," to be published in November, after having excised the now infamous Danish cartoons as well as Gustave Dore's illustration of Mohammed for Canto 28 of Dante's "Inferno."
Raymond J. Learsy: "Spiritual America": Censorship at Yale, and Now London? 2009
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It's actually a slight bowdlerization of a Tony Robbins quote - not that I'm a huge Tony Robbins fan, but this one's pretty good.
Blogging the Bridge Conference: Integrating Social Media 2008
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Perhaps punishing Lucifee isn't such a bad bowdlerization?
Why I hate my daughter's favorite movie. Angry Professor 2006
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Perhaps it was the bowdlerization that led to this usage, but even in the thirties some writers use the term "patriarchy" in a derogatory sense as the rule by male tyrants.
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Ann Althouse 2006
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What I objected to was the bowdlerization of the biographical tradition.
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Garner, always the character, once described the office of the vice presidency as being "not worth a bucket of warm piss" at the time reported with the bowdlerization "spit" and that his decision to take it in the first place was "the worst damn fool mistake I ever made."
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Englemann's work has quite clearly and unequivocally brought out the nature of Wittgenstein's well-known protestations against such a bowdlerization of his thoughts as that of Russell in his introductory essay to the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein's Strategy Janik, Allan 1969
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Already his work has weathered rejection by publishers, objection by printers, suppression by censors, confiscation by custom officials, bowdlerization by pirates, oversight by proofreaders, attack by critics, and defense by coteries -- not to mention misunderstanding by readers.
James Joyce 1946
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