bowdlerize

Etymology

Bowdler + -ize; named after English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825). In 1818 he published a censored version of William Shakespeare (The Family Shakespeare), expurgating “those words and expressions […] which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”

verb

1. To remove or alter those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly.
   The bowdlerized version of the novel, while free of vulgarity, was also free of flavor.
   Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. "There ought to be a Censorship of Books." . . . Ogilvy pursued his own topic. "I'm inclined to think, Stanley, myself that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and Juliet did the mischief. . . . All they left it was the moon and stars. And the balcony and ‘My Romeo!’" "Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff. Altogether different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't want to Bowdlerize Shakespeare." 1909, H. G. Wells, chapter 1, in Ann Veronica
   His critics take alarm only when it becomes apparent that he would bowdlerize Homer and exclude from his state the great tragedians. 1961, J. A. Philip, “Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato,”, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, volume 92, page 455
   Let me tell you about Madicken. (Mardie in English. Or Meg, but that’s in the American translation and that’s bowdlerized and you should never read it.) 7 January 2014, Market Chipping, “Why you should read the Madicken (Mardie) books”, in Market Chipping (blog), retrieved 2016-03-08