Bowdlerization

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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

To remove those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly.
The bowdlerized version of the novel, while free of vulgarity, was also free of flavor.
- 1961, J. A. Philip, "Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 92, p. 455,
  His critics take alarm only when it becomes apparent that he would bowdlerize Homer and exclude from his state the great tragedians.

Etymology

From Thomas Bowdler who in 1818 published a censored version of Shakespeare, The Family Shakespeare, expurgating "those words and expressions... which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family."