They can sometimes draw attention to what they aim to conceal, but they have found useful new life on social media as a marker of disdain

Is “n*gger” the same as the N-word? It’s a question we chose to avoid earlier this year. When writing a piece about the differences between book titles in the UK and the US, we decided to describe Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery as a “novel that included the N-word in its title”, judging that spelling out the word didn’t meet the test our style guide advises of being “essential” to the story. But we didn’t use the asterisk.

Before we get too far into a discussion of that word, note that this is not an essay on race – instead, it’s an apologia for the asterisk. Over the past 120 years, our poor little * has morphed into the linguistic equivalent of black Xs plastered on nipples to disguise what’s underneath. The problem is: the Xs make you look; there’s a reason why the 2011 NewSouth edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn replaced “nigger” with “slave” and did not invoke asterisks: no matter what word they’re used in, we all know d*mn well what letter is being covered. The asterisk hides nothing.

The official term is bowdlerisation: replacing that which offends. Merriam-Webster defines the word as “expurgat[ing] (something, such as a book) by omitting or modifying parts considered vulgar.” Personally, I find the meaning of the N-word itself far more vulgar than any vowel. The editor of the NewSouth’s Huck Finn, Alan Gribben, agrees. He says that while he did consider using the word with an asterisk, “in the case of the N-word, the n*gger device is not an adequate solution; it too closely resembles the detested slur”.

In other words, replacing a letter with an asterisk is just pretence. The word “bowdlerisation” itself is manipulated; a noun resulting from the verb “to bowdlerise”, which was taken from Thomas Bowdler’s name. A turn-of-the-century physician, Bowdler published The Family Shakspeare because straight-up Will was apparently too raunchy for the ladies. He didn’t pull the “e” to suit any puritan wiles (“Shakspeare” was an accepted spelling at the time). Instead, “God!” became “Heavens!”, Henry IV, Part Two’s prostitute was pulled from the script, and in Bowdler’s Hamlet, Ophelia accidentally drowns instead of killing herself – all without the asterisk.

Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) some day, the first T***p supporter self-immolations, protesting T***p impeachment & public exposure of his myriad crimes including tax evasion, sexual predation, contempt for his supporters. https://t.co/DGnFv5S3jw

Indeed, this 5,000 year-old piece of punctuation has only stood in for letters the last three centuries or so, joined by the en dash in the 1950s. Don’t get me started on all the changes the dash has seen: let’s just say modern Jane Austen readers may have serious concerns about the -----shire regiment. Be it by dash or by asterisk, though, when it comes to bowdlerisation, fellow English writer Charlotte Brontë had consternations of her own: “The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile.”

The word “bowdlerisation” itself first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1836, but asterisks were in use to obfuscate unsuspecting letters long before that. In The Language Wars, Henry Hitchings traces the asterisk’s earliest deployment to the 18th century, noting that by the 1940s, accepted style was to blot out not just the offending vowel, rather a word’s “second, third, and sometimes also fourth letters” as well.

Not to be confined to softening offensive words, the asterisk is evolving again. People have taken to using the symbol in words they simply don’t like, such as “transgendered” or “D*nald Tr*mp” – the latter gaining cult p*pularity on Twitter, with even Joyce Carol Oates joining in. As for “transgendered”, that word was briefly a no-no for Target, the American superstore ironically known for its progressive gender-neutral bathroom policy. On the company website, entire words were recently bowdlerised in descriptions of books it sells. For $18, you can buy Jack Halberstam’s Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, which explores “public discussions of ***** issues”. Other terms, such as “Nazi”, “stripper” and “queer”, were also replaced, as well as one children’s fiction reference to a dragon “snatching” books. Publishers were outraged, the story made the news, and Target brought the words back – blaming an overzealous metadata filter. Apparently, they were not so offensive after all.

But the N-word is. It is a word that truly merits stripping away, it is wretched regardless of whether an asterisk is included or not. And perhaps this best demonstrates why we use them: not to hide letters, but to throw some shield, as tiny as that * may be, between the reader and evil. It is the only keystroke we have capable of stripping words of some power.