Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb Present participle of expurgate.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Suppose I trusted you, gave myself with my heart, and in after years you should fall upon the idea of expurgating all sensations, all heresies, all affections from your life as the Brahmins do, what then would become of poor Jessica?

    The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance Paul Elmer More 1900

  • I spent the afternoon "expurgating" a novel for the news-editor's use and behoof.

    The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career Lucy Maud 1917

  • Out of desperation, I started reading Conan stories, expurgating as I went (skipping racial rants and references to woman stealingh and brothels, mostly).

    REVIEW: Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman 2009

  • Nope, it's all the feminists and the post-structuralists and academic softies who have done the damage and who need expurgating or expunging or whatever.

    Benjamin R. Barber: The Real Villans of 9/11 Finally Revealed! 2008

  • Since expurgating Homer did not work, Plato resorted to cosmological movement as a a grand machine, a theory of change to sweep away Homeric dominance of Greek education.

    Fun with Harold « So Many Books 2006

  • According to [Friedrich] Solmenson, Plato began [in the Republic] by expurgating everything colorful and all-too-human in the Homeric gods.

    Fun with Harold « So Many Books 2006

  • By expurgating all words that might be troublesome - "bad" is no longer permitted, but becomes "double-plus-ungood" - and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean - the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information - the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight.

    Orwell and me 2003

  • Some developed sensitiveness with the progress of expurgating the poison, until their very hair and nails felt sore, and the whole surface of the skin suffered from cold air or water like the lips of a wound.

    The Opium Habit Horace B. Day

  • "Happily for historic truth," says Mr. Tylor, "mythic tradition tells its tales without expurgating the episodes which betray its real character to more critical observation."

    Moon Lore Timothy Harley

  • What we want in telling it to the young, is to take the epic just as it is, condensing and expurgating, but not changing; rendering the characters, scenes and situations with the faithfulness and reverence due to the masterpiece of a race; using as much as possible, especially in the dialogue, the words of the original ....

    The Translations of Beowulf A Critical Bibliography Chauncey Brewster Tinker 1919

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