Down in Menifee, California, they’ve gone and banned the dictionary from schools.
Apparently, the Merriam-Webster 10th Edition contains a definition of “oral sex,” which makes it a completely inappropriate reference book for fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms. In response to a parent complaint, the Menifee Union School District has pulled the offending book from shelves in all schools.
I thought I had heard it all. Some wackos want The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned because the characters in a story set in antebellum Missouri keep using the word “nigger.” Other wackos want the Harry Potter books banned because they’re all about witchcraft and will turn kids into Satanists or something. People of various social, religious and political leanings want various things banned, from Daddy’s Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies to To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple. The Goosebumps books are too scary and On the Origin of Species turns high schoolers into godless evolution-believing heathens and Of Mice and Men makes students think it’s okay to kill their mentally handicapped friends and My Brother Sam is Dead is too intense for elementary school students who should be learning that the American Revolution was a glorious and bloodless conflict.
And now the dictionary is just too much, because it’s just full of, in the words of elementary school teacher, parent and school board member Randy Freeman, “words of concern.”
In my elementary school library, there was a great big unabridged Webster’s on a stand in the reference section. Any student who was in the library was welcome to look up words in it. It didn’t require adult supervision or special permission or anything of the sort. Just feel free to go and peruse the dictionary, as much as you like. Spending a class period in the library one day in third or fourth grade, my friends and I went to the dictionary and, like millions of schoolchildren before and after us, we looked up “fuck” and “shit” and “piss” and all the other cuss words we could think of. We giggled over them and felt like we were getting away with something.
I don’t know about my friends, but I went back to the dictionary again later on. The definitions of the dirty words we’d looked up contained other words I didn’t understand. So I went back and looked up bizarre new words like “excrete” and “coitus,” which sent me spinning off in other directions, leafing through the pages, discovering new words and new concepts. I was also trying to puzzle out the difference between the words that the dictionary had described as “vulgar” and those it had described as “obscene.” To my young mind, they were all just cuss words, and the idea that there was some difference in classification between the different cuss words was a new one to me. I eventually decided that the vulgar ones were the ones that my Dad would say when my Mom wasn’t around, and the obscene ones were the ones he almost never said at all, Mom in the room or not.
And yet, somehow, having spent so much time as an impressionable young lad looking up and thinking about foul language, I’m not a pervert or deviant sex fiend or anything of the sort. And, in spite of my generally salty tone here on the blog, I’m perfectly capable of going for hours at a time without using the word “fuck” in my conversation at all.
One effect of looking up those dirty words was that it demystified them for me. I understood what they really meant (though I’ll admit that at that age, my grasp of “fuck” as a concept in the traditional verb sense was still tenuous at best), and was able to recognize that, in the end, they’re just words. They couldn’t be as horrible as all that if the dictionary people were allowed to print them in a dictionary that was in a school library. Why, they weren’t even in a special section of the dictionary. “Fuck” was right there between “fuchsia” and “fucoid.”
I remain, as always, completely baffled by the impulse that so many ostensible adults have to appoint themselves the Moral Guardians of society and attempt to hide things from children rather than explain them. Protect children from the world rather than expose them to it. Stifle their curiosity rather than encourage it. Far better to make any mention, exploration or mere thought of “adult” topics completely taboo to children. Because that always works flawlessly.
We’re banning the dictionary now, for Pete’s sake? We’re that terrified that our children will look up “words of concern?” The only reason they’re “words of concern” is because you make them “words of concern,” fuckface. “Sticks and stones” and all that, right? If you’re not concerned about these words, your children won’t concern themselves with them, either. Seriously. Banning the fucking dictionary is the stupidest, shittiest fucking idea I’ve ever heard, and anyone who thinks that protecting children from words is a good idea is a real fucking asshole.
The preceding post contains words, many of them words of concern, and maybe even and idea or two, and therefore should not have been viewed by the children of the Menifee Union School District.