Dictionary Definitions: Too Sexy for Schools?

In an act of censorship that might be upsetting if it weren’t so quaint, Menifee Union School District in Riverside, California, has pulled its dictionaries from school shelves. The reason? The copies of Merriam-Webster’s 10th edition contain a definition for the term “oral sex.”

The move came after a parent lodged a complaint and administrators agreed to review the term, as well as to comb through the offending volume for more potentially scandalous entries. "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," stated district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. Just how graphic is the dictionary entry in question? It reads: Main Entry: oral sex Function: noun Date: 1973: oral stimulation of the genital.

Now, perhaps there are people who find the arid language of dictionary definitions to be stimulating. But could there be a less graphic definition of this term?

While a meticulously compiled reference tool is being pulled from classrooms, picked over by parents, and prodded for salacious definitions by school administrators, let's not forget that the year is 2010, not 1910. There is something called the Internet, and if curious kids are discouraged from using the right resources to get answers, they can (and will) search online. When they do, they'll find a phantasmagoria of sexually explicit words and images that have absolutely nothing to do with defining or educating.

Sure, there are settings that can be installed to make the Internet “child safe.” But fourth- and fifth-graders are already wondering about sex and all the mysterious activities that go along with it, and it doesn't take much to enter a term into a search engine. Which would you rather a child do: consult her school dictionary when she hears the term “oral sex,” or Google it?

Schools need to be providing education, not censoring information. And if you believe that blocking "inappropriate" terms from school dictionaries will keep kids in the dark about sex, you may need to do a little Googling of your own.

Update 1/27/10: A committee has decided to return the dictionaries to district schools, but parents will need to sign a permission slip before kids can peruse them. "The dictionary will go back to the classroom but the parents will be given the option to determine if they want their kids to have access to that dictionary," said Betti Cadmus. Consequently, the "O" section of Merriam-Webster's 10th edition may soon receive more hype among fourth- and fifth-graders than Lady Chatterley's Lover did among housewives in the early '60s. File that under another censorship fail.

Photo credit: Hammer51012