The very fact that the text has had a word excised is itself an important lesson in the history and politics of language, but it's a lesson lost on young people if you can't even bring yourself to tell them, unambiguously, what that word is.Update: There's a good discussion at the New York Times' "Room for Debate", with a preponderance in favour of keeping Twain as is.
My friend Gary periodically performs what he calls "rhetorical surgery" on himself, excising from his vocabulary a word that feels drained of all meaning.
Nobody had said a word about excise taxes and rum on the floor of the House or the Senate in the two years since the provision was renewed the last time.
Was there an outcry last year when the ridiculous "politically correct" decision in 1989 to excise the word "winner" from the ceremony was overturned?
A Trumpian world would excise the words of welcome on the base of the Statue of Liberty and place a new wall around her.
Of course, Satarii had to excise a few features to make that smaller price tag work.
The bishops excised the word censure, however, and instead passed a blander measure that says they acknowledge and apologize for their mistakes, an echo of the apology they issued in Dallas.
Critics who called out the NBC poll for excising the word "choice" from its question about a public option for health insurance will be happier by next month's survey, which will ask the question both with and without that key element.
"Can you cure cancer by excising the word from medical text books?" asks Hakki Devrim, a doyen of Turkish journalism who has been writing about language for decades.
He said: "So negative is the No campaign it seems that they have excised the word 'Yes' from any possible usage". Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander, a leading figure in the Better Together campaign, told BBC Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme the debate was a "hugely significant, perhaps decisive" moment in the campaign.
I want to excise the words 'guilt' and 'shame' from the conversation.
