Bowdlerise/Literature: Difference between revisions

*** Replacing God's name with a word meaning "Lord" is much older than KJV; the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate did the same thing ("Kyrios" and "Dominus", respectively). And so did (and still do) the Jews (replacing it with "Adonai"); the God's name was considered so sacred that only the High Priest was allowed to say it. ("Jehovah" is believed to have originated by combining the consonants of God's name with the vowels of "Adonai"; "Yahweh" is a modern reconstruction of the pronunciation.)

** The Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, is perhaps the raciest book in [[The Bible]]. However, even this version may have been [[Bowdlerized]] from the original, For instance, in the selection where the lover describes his beloved, he says her waist is like a heap of wheat. Given that this breaks the order of the narrative, many Biblical scholars believe that the original translation referred to a different part of the female anatomy.

* [[Terry Pratchett]] canceled plans for a movie of ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Mort|Mort]]'' when the producers told him they loved the story (about {{smallcaps| [[Anthropomorphic Personification|Death]]}} taking an apprentice) but wanted to lose the "Death" angle.

** That makes me die a little inside.

* In the original prints of "Super Fudge," Fudge mentions his favorite TV shows are ''[[The Muppet Show]]'', ''[[Sesame Street]]'', and ''[[The Electric Company]]''. In modern reprints, the line was changed to "cartoons from Nickelodeon and [[Cartoon Network]]" due to a combination of licensing issues and an attempt at making the story less outdated <ref> As an aside, the Muppets had a movie out in November of 2011, Sesame Street is still on the air, and The Electric Company was revived in 2009 -- though it's not the same as it was back in the 1970s</ref>.

* Modern reprints of Enid Blyton's classic ''The Faraway Tree'' children's series rename the characters Dick and Fanny to Rick and Frannie because of the "sexual nature" of their names. The villainous school teacher Dame Slap, so named for the punishment she dishes out to students, is renamed "Dame Snap" and now punishes students by loudly reprimanding them instead of spanking them.

* ''Are U 4 Real'', the American translation of Sara Kadefors’ Swedish young-adult novel ''[[Sandor Slash Ida]]'', suffered from this trope. The story was relocated from the Swedish cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm to San Francisco and Los Angeles, the teenaged protagonists’ names were changed from Sandor and Ida into Alex and Kyla and several parts of the book dealing with Ida’s sexual experiences were censored or removed entirely. The author was not happy and stated that the censored parts are necessary to understand why Ida acts the way she does in the story. The American translator defended the changes, stating that the original contained ”too much sex” and that it would have been hard to sell in American stores.

* ''[[The Canterbury Tales (Literature)|The Canterbury Tales]]'' has gotten this treatment as [[School Study Media]]. Teachers will often only cover the pilgrims as characters and a few cherry-picked tales (the Pardoner's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale, etc.) in isolation from the other Tales. Not to mention the frequency with which they'll suppress any discussion of the other stories, most notably the Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale. As a result, the students (assuming that they have had no experience with ''[[The Canterbury Tales (Literature)|The Canterbury Tales]]'' up until that point) only get to know about the characters and some of the stories, and don't get to read them in the context in which they're presented: as an argument where the pilgrims are telling their stories basically to prove their points and, sometimes, as [[Take That|take thats]] at each other.

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[[Category:Bowdlerise]]