Normally I'm chagrined but not shocked when I hear that a school has banned a book, but my mouth hung agape when I read that a California school district has banned the Merriam Webster Dictionary from its classrooms. Oh, wait, sorry; according to the Los Angeles Times article, the school district didn't ban the tomes, but rather "temporarily housed [them] off location" till their suitability for the district's pupils can be assessed, said a spokeswoman for the Menifee Union School District in southwest Riverside County.
So what evils lurk inside Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.)? Well, oral sex, for one thing. A Menifee parent contacted the principal of Oak Meadows Elementary School to complain that book contained the term and its graphic definition. Now, a committee is being formed to sift the dictionary -- which I'll refer to henceforth as the MWCD -- to see what other potentially explicit terms and definitions skulk inside.
I grant that the aghast parent contacted the elementary school, which presumably means her/his child is at an age at which, you could argue, the term oral sex should not be a part of the common vernacular. Also, the school district's spokeswoman took pains to note that the MWCD, which had been available in the fourth and fifth grade classrooms, is not the only dictionary available in the district's schools. But it turns out that the term oral sex was not actually in the MWCD, according to the Southwest Riverside News!
Does a collegiate dictionary belong in elementary school classrooms? As the district's school board president Rita Peters noted, the schools use the MWCD for their spelling bees. I'm personally inclined to agree with Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, who told the LA Times, "At the end of the day, if my kid is digging through the Merriam Webster dictionary to find words he and his friends are going to giggle over but along the way find other words they will use, I think that is a day well spent in school." But are there other word tomes that eschew terms such as oral sex, yet still provide the range of a collegiate dictionary? I suppose the school district's committee will attempt to figure that out.
In the interim, if you're like me, imaging this group's working sessions conjures more than a few grins.
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You're so right to grin at the images of the group's working sessions, and I send props for your title of this post, as well. In other words, great head.
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