Welcome to another mind-bending episode of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! Keep your brain in tip-top shape by expanding your vocabulary. Now let's get those brain cells warmed up with the Word of the Week:
Bowdlerize: Thomas Bowdler was an Edinburgh doctor of medicine who turned to publishing and produced heavily expurgated editions of Shakespeare and other authors. In his Family Shakespeare, published in 1818, he altered or cut out passages which could not, in his opinion,'with propriety be read aloud in a family.' Dr. Bowdler, then, could be said to be the spiritual forebear of today's would-be censors of books, plays and films whose judgements are biased by their own ideas of what is moral and what is not. To use the word which is derived from Bowdler's name, such people such people would undoubtedly be in favor of Bowdlerizing. -- "A Dictionary of Eponyms", Third Edition, Cyril Leslie Beeching, Library Association Publishing Ltd., London, 1989.
Example: Jimmy was unimpressed with parents' attempts at bowdlerizing his blog.
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