Naughty dictionary

Catcher in the Rye, the Harry Potter books, the Twilight series – you might have heard that in the US, some parents and teachers in some schools have asked that these and other books be banned from libraries or classrooms. I've written before about how crazy this makes me. So guess what the newest banned book is.

No, really, guess!

Need a hint? How many of you have ever looked up a dirty word in the dictionary? 

That's right. A school district in California has removed all copies of the Merriam-Webster 10th edition from its fourth and fifth-grade classrooms after a pupil's mother saw an entry for "oral sex" in the dictionary. (Here's an article from the Guardian about it.)

So how old were you when you were looking up dirty words in the dictionary? I remember that when I was nine and ten years old, in the fourth and fifth grades, there were a lot of exciting new words that I wanted to know about, and did not want my parents or teachers to define for me. (Though when I think about it, whenever I asked what a word meant, I always was told, "Go look it up in the dictionary.") 

One the one hand, the Merriam-Webster is meant to be a dictionary for university students. The reason the schools had the dictionary in some of their classrooms in the first place was to help the pupils who were more advanced readers. So maybe I could see why some might think that a dictionary for older people is not appropriate for ten-year-olds.

But on the other hand, excuse me while I pull my hair out and go scream in my pillow. It's just a dictionary for crying out loud in a bucket!

For the moment, the dictionaries have been removed from the classrooms, and the complaint is being reviewed. In the meantime, someone needs to invent a new word for "crazy".