Form of censorship of artistic or other media works From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization, fig-leaf edition or censorship by political correctness is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.[1][2][3][4]
The term bowdlerization is often used in the context of the expurgation of lewd material from books.[5] 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.[6] He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.[7] 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.[8][9]
A fig-leaf edition is a more satirical term for a bowdlerized text, deriving from the practice of covering the genitals of nudes in classical and Renaissance statues and paintings with fig leaves.
Due to its mockery of the ancestors of the modern British Royal Family,[16] graphic descriptions of sex acts, and the symptoms of venereal disease,[17]Scottish Gaelicnational poetAlasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's groundbreaking 1751poetry bookAis-eridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich ("The Resurrection of the Old Scottish Language") continued to be republished only in heavily bowdlerized editions by puritanical censors throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.[18] The first uncensored text was published only in 2020.[19]
"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.[20] Over the years, sanitized versions of the song were released in which a lobster or crab grabs the wife by the nose[21] instead of by the genitals,[20] 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" (ass).[22]
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.[24][25]
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.[26]
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.[27]
Racial
Recent editions of many works—including Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn[28] 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.[29][30]
Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers was dramatised by the BBC under the name And Then There Were None. It was subsequently re-released under this title in the United States, and the short poem which is intrinsic to the plot was changed from Ten Little Niggers to Ten Little Indians.[31][32]
The American version of the counting rhyme "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe", which was changed by some to add the word "nigger",[33] 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.[34] For further information, see The Hardy Boys#1959–1979.
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).[35][36]
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 or variants, such as 'fcuk' or 'pron'.[37][38]
The 2010 song "Fuck You" by CeeLo Green, which made the top-10 in thirteen countries, was also broadcast as "Forget You", with a matching music video, where the changed lyrics cannot be lip-read, as insisted on by the record company.[39]
Other
A student edition of the 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.[40][41][42][43]
The 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".[44][45]
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".[46] The same was done with the James Bond novels.[47]
Crider, Bill (Fall 1980). Lee, Billy C.; Laughlin, Charlotte (eds.). "Reprints/Reprints: Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451". Paperback Quarterly. III (3): 25. ISBN9781434406330. Archived from the original on 4 May 2021. Retrieved 11 November 2020. The censorship began with a special 'Bal-Hi' edition in 1967, an edition designed for high school students...
Karolides, Nicholas J.; Bald, Margaret; Sova, Dawn B. (2011). 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (Seconded.). Checkmark Books. p.488. ISBN978-0-8160-8232-2. In 1967, Ballantine Books published a special edition of the novel to be sold in high schools. Over 75 passages were modified to eliminate such words as hell, damn, and abortion, and two incidents were eliminated. The original first incident described a drunk man who was changed to a sick man in the expurgated edition. In the second incident, reference is made to cleaning fluff out of the human navel, but the expurgated edition changed the reference to cleaning ears.
Karolides, Nicholas J.; Bald, Margaret; Sova, Dawn B. (2011). 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (Seconded.). Checkmark Books. p.488. ISBN978-0-8160-8232-2. After six years of simultaneous editions, the publisher ceased publication of the adult version, leaving only the expurgated version for sale from 1973 through 1979, during which neither Bradbury nor anyone else suspected the truth.
