The Clever Badger One lab accident away from being a super villain

Censoring the Dictionary

(NOTE: No sooner do I post this than I discover that the issue has been resolved by returning the dictionaries to the shelves, but making other dictionaries available.  That seems like a reasonable solution, but the fact that this was even an issue in the first place is still absurd.) 

Ed Brayton at Dispatches From The Culture Wars had an interesting article this morning. 

It seems that school officials in Menifee, California  have yanked the Merriam Webster's 10^th edition dictionary out of schools because, horror of horrors, it contains a definition for "oral sex".  (The original story reports that the dictionaries were used in fourth and fifth grade classrooms, and had been on the shelves for a few years.)

(There is an ambiguity in the above article, but a related article calls out the MW 10^th edition Collegiate dictionary that I linked to above as the offending book.  It does not appear to contain that specific entry, although it does contain entries for more specific acts.)

It's difficult to read one of the comments by Betti Cadmus, spokeswoman for the Menifee Union School District, without snickering:

"It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.

So, the Menifee school board is going to sit around with dictionaries looking up dirty words.  I wonder how many of the Menifee school board members were doing exactly the same thing when they were in fifth grade?  History is not without a sense of humor, it seems.

The fact of the matter is that by the fourth or fifth grade, many, if not most, of those kids have probably been exposed to most of those words, whether they've overheard them from older kids or adults, encountered them scrawled on the wall in the restroom, or picked up on them from movies or TV.  That's not to say we need to be encouraging 10-year-old kids to run around swearing like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman - far from it.  One parent of students in the school system summed it up well:

"Censorship in the schools, really? Pretty soon the only dictionary in the school library will be the Bert and Ernie dictionary," said Emanuel Chavez, the parent of second- and sixth-grade students. "If the kids are exposed to it, it's up to the parents to explain it to them at their level."

What a revolutionary thought!  Parents actually doing something parenty!  In America!  In 2010!¹

One big problem with this variety of censorship is how difficult it is to define what you're looking to censor.  It would be interesting to see if all of the school board members would be able to agree on a list of naughty words that would need to be absent in any approved dictionary.  Maybe you start with the Carlin Seven and expand from there.  But where do you end?  The possibilities are mind-boggling.²

Another problem with censorship of this nature is defining precisely what your goals are.  In this case, terms like "age appropriate" are tossed around, but it appears that the real motivation has more to do with the breathtakingly inane idea that if kids don't know the terms for sexual acts, then they won't figure them out on their own.³

The final decision on the fate of the dictionary in Menifee will be determined by a committee consisting of principals, teachers, parents, and district representatives. 

Hopefully saner heads will prevail.

-Jay

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¹I can still remember pretty clearly the look on my mom's face when I, as a third grader, asked "Mom, what does "f*ck" mean?

²The mental picture of members of the school board sitting around a table discussing whether to ban the word "beaver" is both amusing and sad. The mental picture of members of the school board trying to decide whether they should still be referred to as "members" of the school board is just amusing.

³Considering how obsessed that we, as a society, are with sex, I'm often amazed at how we, as a society, are also largely terrified of it.