To bowdlerize a book, play, or film is to cut out the bits you think might shock or offend people — sex, rude jokes, violent lines, anything you have decided is “not nice.” The word is not a compliment. When we say someone bowdlerized a text, we usually mean they cleaned it up in a nervous, heavy-handed way, and that something true or alive was lost. It comes from Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published The Family Shakespeare, a Shakespeare with the lines he felt you could not read aloud in a family taken out. People have argued ever since about whether he was protecting children or flattening a great writer. You can bowdlerize a novel, a script, a song, even a school edition of a classic. British spelling often has -ise (bowdlerise); American spelling keeps -ize. Both are the same word.

刪改淨化（去掉可能冒犯的內容；帶貶義）