comstockery

Etymology

Named after Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) (and the Comstock laws which he propagated) + -ery, coined in an editorial in The New York Times in 1895 and famously adopted by George Bernard Shaw in 1905.

Why this word is great

COMSTOCKERY — Noun. The suppression of literature and performances under sweeping, often puritanical standards of obscenity, named for Anthony Comstock, the zealous 19th-century moral crusader who wielded both law and social pressure to purge art of perceived indecency. From the proper name Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), advocate of anti-obscenity laws, + the suffix -ery (denoting a practice or condition). Unlike bowdlerization, which prunes texts with surgical (if prudish) precision, or puritanism, a blanket disdain for pleasure, Comstockery is a cudgel swung by institutions, leaving shattered presses and shuttered theaters in its wake. Picture yellowed pamphlets seized from a printer’s backroom, a vaudeville stage gone silent mid-joke, a museum’s nude statue draped in burlap—each act a small death for the unsanctioned, the unshriven. In the end, it is not the obscene that frightens, but the fervor of those who claim to know it when they see it.

noun

  1. Censorship of literature and performances because of especially broad definitions of obscenity or immorality.“1905, George Bernard Shaw, letter, New York Times, Sept. 26, 1905, Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States.”