Expurgation


An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization or fig-leafing, 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 often used in the context of the expurgation of lewd material from books. The term derives from Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of William Shakespeare's plays, which he reworked in ways that he felt were more suitable for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A less common term used in this context, also based on common editorial practice, is Ad usum Delphini, referring to a series of consciously censored classical works.
Another term used in related discourse is censorship by so-called political correctness. When this practice is adopted voluntarily, by publishers of new editions or translators, it is seen as a form of self-censorship. Texts subject to expurgation are derivative works, sometimes subject to renewed copyright protection.

Examples

Religious

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 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 first uncensored text was published only in 2020.
  • "The Crabfish", 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".
  • The 1925 Harvard Press edition of Montaigne's essays 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

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 or bizarre
  • 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