Expurgation

Examples

Religious

• In 1264, Pope Clement IV ordered the Jews of the Crown of Aragon to submit their books to Dominican censors for expurgation.

Sexual

• Due to its mockery of the ancestors of the modern British royal family, graphic descriptions of sex acts, and the symptoms of venereal disease, the 1751 Scottish Gaelic poetry book Ais-eridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich ("The Resurrection of the Old Scottish Language") by Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, national poet of Scotland, continued to be republished only in heavily bowdlerized editions by puritanical censors throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The Scottish Poetry Library interviews Alan Riach about Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, June 2016.
• Willies, ghillies and horny Highlanders: Scottish Gaelic writing has a filthy past by Peter MacKay, University of St. Andrews, The Conversation, 24 October 2017. The first uncensored text was published only in 2020.
• "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, 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, and others in which each potentially offensive word is replaced with an inoffensive word that does not fit the rhyme scheme, thus implying that there is a correct word that does rhyme. 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) omitted the essays that pertain to sex.
• A Boston-area ban on Upton Sinclair'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)" 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 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.
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by English author D. H. Lawrence. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960.
• Several music artists have changed song titles to appease radio stations. For example, an expurgated remix of Snoop Dogg's song "Wet" was released under the title "Sweat" and Rihanna's song "S&M" had to be changed to "C'mon" in the UK.

Racial

• Recent editions of many works—including Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus—have found various replacements ("slave", "Indian", "soldier boy", "N-word", "children") for the word nigger. An example of bowdlerization can be plainly seen in Huckleberry Finn, in which Twain used racial slurs in natural speech to highlight what he saw as racism and prejudice endemic to the Antebellum South.
• Agatha Christie's 1939 book Ten Little Niggers was titled And Then There Were None for the US market in 1940, with some paperback editions calling it Ten Little Indians. UK editions continued to use the original title into the 1980s, and French editions were called Dix Petits Nègres until 2020.
• The American version of the counting rhyme "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe", which was changed by some to add the word "nigger", is now sung with a different word, such as "tiger".
• The Hardy Boys children's mystery novels (published starting in 1927) contained heavy doses of racism. They were extensively revised starting in 1959 in response to parents' complaints about racial stereotypes in the books. For further information, see The Hardy Boys#1959%E2%80%931979.
• The Story of Doctor Dolittle and relevant works have been reedited to remove controversial references to and plots related to non-white characters (in particular, African ones).

Cursing

• Many Internet message boards and forums use automatic wordfiltering to block offensive words and phrases from being published or automatically amend them to more innocuous substitutes such as asterisks or nonsense. This often catches innocent words, in a scenario referred to as the Scunthorpe problem: words such as 'assassinate' and 'classic' may become 'buttbuttinate' or 'clbuttic'. Users frequently self-bowdlerize their own writing by using slight misspellings, minced oaths or variants, such as 'flek', 'fcuk' or 'pron'.
• In a similar vein, content creators feel that the algorithms that spread their content or make it fit for revenue may turn against them, if certain topics are mentioned, prompting them to come up with euphemisms that may sound childish at times (a gynaecologist talking about lady bits to avoid vagina mistakenly prompting the algorithm to think the matter is too obscene to be worth broadcasting) or bizarre (a video-essay on a murder may reference the act as un-aliving)
• The 2010 song "Fuck You" by CeeLo Green, which made the top-10 in thirteen countries, was broadcast as "Forget You", with a matching music video, where the changed lyrics cannot be lip-read, as insisted on by the record company.
• The 2021 song "ABCDEFU" by Gayle was also bowdlerized for radio, with the new lyrics reading: 'A, B, C, D, E, forget you', in a similar fashion to Fuck You.

Other

• A student edition of the 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 was expurgated 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's attention and he convinced the publisher to reinstate the material.
• The 2017 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".
• In 2023 new versions of Roald Dahl's books were published by Puffin Books to remove language deemed inappropriate. Puffin had hired sensitivity readers to go over his texts to make sure the books could "continue to be enjoyed by all today". The same was done with the James Bond novels.

References

References

1. Salvador, Roberto. (2023-06-13). "Censorship and Expurgation of the Selected Children's Literature". The Quest: Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development.
2. Sturm, Michael O.. (1983). "Censorship: Where Do We Stand?". American Secondary Education.
3. Merkle, Denise. (2001). "Translation and meaning. 5: Proceedings of the Maastricht session of the 3rd International Maastricht-Łódz Duo Colloquium on "Translation and Meaning", held in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 26 - 29 April 2000 / Marcel Thelen .. ed". Euroterm.
4. "Expurgation of Library Resources: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights {{!}} ALA".
5. Goldstein, Kenneth S.. (1967). "Bowdlerization and Expurgation: Academic and Folk". The Journal of American Folklore.
6. Wheeler, Kip. (). "Censorship and Bowdlerization". [[Carson-Newman University]].
7. Gibbon, Edward. (1826). "Gibbon's History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, repr. with the omission of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency, by T. Bowdler".
8. Hollewand, Karen E.. (2019-03-11). "Scholarship". Brill.
9. (2021). "Classical Scholarship and Its History".
10. Essi, Cedric. (December 2018). "Queer Genealogies across the Color Line and into Children's Literature: Autobiographical Picture Books, Interraciality, and Gay Family Formation". Genealogy.
11. Woods, Michelle. (2019). "The Routledge handbook of literary translation". Routledge.
12. Smith, Cathay Y. N.. (2024-01-12). "Editing Classic Books: A Threat to the Public Domain? - Virginia Law Review".
13. Popper, William. (May 1889). "The Censorship of Hebrew Books". Knickerbocker Press.
14. Greenfield, Jeanette. (26 January 1996). "The Return of Cultural Treasures". [[Cambridge University Press]].
15. Carus, Paul. (1925). "The Open Court". Open Court Publishing Company.
16. Charles MacDonald (2011), ''Moidart: Among the Clanranalds'', [[Birlinn Limited]]. pp. 129-130.
17. Derek S. Thomson (1983), ''The Companion to Gaelic Scotland'', page 185.
18. [https://www.gaelicbooks.org/explore-the-shop/poetry/traditional-poetry/aiseirigh-orain-le-alastair-mac-mhaighstir-alastair Aiseirigh: Òrain le Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alastair], [[The Gaelic Books Council]].
19. (1867). "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: loose and humorous songs".
20. Feierabend, John M.. (1 April 2004). "The Crabfish". Gia Publications.
21. , . (). ["The Crayfish"](http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Crayfish.htm#.UTpg1Iy9KSM).
22. Bussacco, Michael C.. (2009). "Heritage Press Sandglass Companion Book: 1960–1983". Tribute Books (Archibald, Penn.).
23. Curtis, Jack. (February 17, 2008). "Blood from Oil". [[The Boston Globe]].
24. Sinclair, Mary Craig. (1957). "Southern Belle". Crown Publishers.
25. Lyngstad, Sverre. (2005). "Knut Hamsun, Novelist: A Critical Assessment". Peter Lang.
26. "When Artists Are Forced to Change Song Titles".
27. Tomasky, Michael. (7 January 2011). "The New ''Huck Finn''". [[The Guardian]].
28. Lowenthal, David. (October 2015). "The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited". [[Cambridge University Press]].
29. Fulton, Joe B.. (1997). "Mark Twain's Ethical Realism: The Aesthetics of Race, Class, and Gender". [[University of Missouri Press]].
30. (26 August 2020). "'N-word' scrapped from French edition of Agatha Christie novel". RFI.
31. (30 October 1997). "The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes". [[Oxford University Press]].
32. Rehak, Melanie. (2005). "Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her". Harvest.
33. Lanes, Selma G. "[https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/28/books/childrens-books-doctor-dolittle-innocent-again.html Doctor Dolittle, Innocent Again]", ''[[New York Times]]''. August 28, 1988.
34. Smith, Cathay Y. N.. (2024-01-12). "Editing Classic Books: A Threat to the Public Domain? - Virginia Law Review".
35. (1999). "Ethics and Electronic Information in the Twenty-first Century". [[Purdue University Press]].
36. Ng, Jason. (27 August 2013). "Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on ChinaÕs Version of Twitter (And Why)". New Press, The.
37. Smith, Caspar Llewellyn. (2010-11-14). "Cee Lo Green: 'I've been such an oddball my whole life' {{!}} Q&A". The Guardian.
38. Hirsh, Marc. (2022-03-11). "Gayle's 'abcdefu' and 10 More Extremely Cursed Radio Edits".
39. Crider, Bill. (Fall 1980). "Reprints/Reprints: ''Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451''". Paperback Quarterly.
40. (2011). "120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature". Checkmark Books.
41. Greene, Bill. (February 2007). "The mutilation and rebirth of a classic: Fahrenheit 451". Villanova University.
42. (2011). "120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature". Checkmark Books.
43. (2016-07-25). "South Park: The Fractured But Whole was originally called South Park: The Butthole of Time".
44. (2017-09-25). "'South Park: The Fractured But Whole' game – everything you need to know".
45. (20 February 2023). "Rishi Sunak joins criticism of changes to Roald Dahl books". [[The Guardian]].
46. Haring, Bruce. (26 February 2023). "James Bond Books Edited To Avoid Offense To Modern Audiences – Report". [[Penske Media Corporation]].