Sujet : Bowdler's Day (11 July)
De : benlizro (at) *nospam* ihug.co.nz (Ross Clark)
Groupes : sci.langDate : 11. Jul 2024, 12:11:06
Autres entêtes
Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID : <v6oekh$2egs0$1@dont-email.me>
User-Agent : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1
On this day was born Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825).
Trained as a physician, but
became more famous for _The Family Shakespeare_ (1807)
(with a great deal of assistance from his sister Harriet).
A version of the plays "in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family."
This sometimes involved the omission of whole scenes whose content was deemed un-family-friendly.
English thus acquired the verb "bowdlerize" (OED 1836-) meaning to remove (supposedly) offensive material from a text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_BowdlerAnd on that note I declare a recess, an adjournment, a moratorium, an interval, a holiday from this activity. I will be away from home, not carrying Crystal's book with me, probably out of reach of Usenet altogether. I plan to resume around September 1.