Today we mark the 1754 birth of a man who was a superb chess player, earned a medical degree (but didn't practice medicine), devoted much of his life to prison reform, and left—as a legacy—his last name. (来源：老牌的英语学习网站 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

We omitted from this recitation one of the major accomplishments of today's birthday boy: Dr. Thomas Bowdler was an editor who published ten volumes of an expurgated, cleaned-up-for-the children collection of William Shakespeare known as The Family Shakespeare.

Bowdler was quite clear about the point of his expunging: "Those expressions are omitted," he announced in the preface in 1818, "which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family." For instance, rather than commit suicide, Ophelia (in the Hamlet edited by Bowdler) instead accidentally drowned.

Although the idea of abridging the Bard was not wholly welcomed, Bowdler's work proved quite popular during his lifetime. And eleven years after Thomas Bowdler was called home—er, passed, er, well, eleven years after he died—his surname became an eponym.

Originally, to bowdlerize was "to expurgate, as a book, by omitting or modifying parts considered vulgar." The censorious sense survives in the second application of bowdlerize: "to modify by abridging, simplifying, or distorting in style or content."