"bowdlerize" is a correct and usable word in written English.
It is a verb which means to take out parts of a text which are considered objectionable or offensive. For example, "The publisher decided to bowdlerize the book by eliminating all profanity in the text."
I have no idea how a fish got a name like Plumier's pigfoot, but Jordan, Evermann, and Clark show some tendency to bowdlerize fishermen's names for unrespected fish, and their transcription may not be accurate.
If such answers are speech, then any government efforts to regulate Google, like any efforts to bowdlerize Ann Landers, must be examined as censorship.
In a recent entertaining rant on his blog, Clef Notes, Mr. Smith, observing that America had its own war to fight in that year, went so far as to suggest — tongue undoubtedly in cheek — that we bowdlerize the overture, Soviet style, so that it culminates not in the czarist anthem but in "The Star-Spangled Banner".
What Lytro has done with this new product is show light-field photography in its purest state, making it hard to dismiss or bowdlerize.
This, by now, is a tediously predictable scenario in contemporary theater: Take a rich classic, bowdlerize it and replace powerful content with humdrum tricks.
"In the Night Kitchen," which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a diaper over Mickey's nether region.
Nevertheless, the publication in 2011 of a bowdlerized version of the novel was considered by many to be every bit as unacceptable as the original.
Revivals of Shakespeare's tragedies were often bowdlerized or altered, as in the happy ending for Lear in a production of 1681.
Some editors for instance, the friar Pipino, who made a good Latin translation of the original found many of Polo's descriptions or interpretations impious or dangerously near to heresy and therefore heavily bowdlerized the text.
Yet it was left to him to write modern China's classic novel, the moving tale of the gradual degeneration of a seemingly incorruptible denizen of China's "lower depths"—Luotuo Xiangzi (1936; "Camel Xiangzi," published in English in a bowdlerized translation as Rickshaw Boy, 1945).
In the late 1920s her record sales and her fame diminished as social forces changed the face of popular music and bowdlerized the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music.
