Here's the opening of "Bowdlerizing Berwick":
Thomas Bowdler was an English physician whose desire to publish an edition of Shakespeare amenable to 19th-century sensibilities led him to sanitize many of the Bard's juiciest passages. The result was predictably risible. One of his most hilarious revisions was to change Lady Macbeth's cri de coeur, "Out, damned spot," to "Out, crimson spot!"More than ever, America needs journalists to shed some light on our elected (and unelected) officials. If the mainstream media aren't doing their jobs, I'm very glad that independent writers and journalists like Catron are stepping up.
As absurd as it was, this project did preserve the good doctor's name for posterity in the verb "bowdlerize." And it would be difficult to come up with a better term to describe what the establishment media have attempted to do with the record of Donald Berwick, the Harvard pediatrician whom our President just appointed Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)...
