There was a news item I saw on Fark, corroborated by a few Google News sources, that Merriam Webster’s 10th edition has been removed from schools because some kid’s parents saw it had “oral sex” defined in the book. Here’s a version of the story from The Guardian.
Surely this is a hoax, right? ETA: Or it’s an Onion article that got absorbed into real news feeds. Please tell me this is a hoax.
It appears to be true. However, it’s not “SoCal schools”, it’s one small school district in southern California.
Menifee? I believe it. They’re loco down there.
From its website:
“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.
I have no response to that.
Maybe Ms Cadmus should examine graph paper. And graphic arts. And graphing calculators. And the Bible (Song of Songs). &c.
I read this earlier, and the only thing I could think of was that Menifee’s clocks all must have stopped right around 1950, and I picture Ms. Cadmus looking exactly like you’d expect a school marm to look.
Tomorrow’s Headline: Menifee USD bans TI-84 calculators!.
Man, looking up words like “intercourse” and “vagina” was what we all did for kicks in the pre-internet days.
It would relieve some of the boredom of reading the dictionary if she had someone give her oral sex at the same time.
Can we start a drive to get as many batshit crazy fundies as possible, to go over as many books as possible (the thicker the better) and screen them for “language”? Thus taking away from their obviously over-abundant spare time in which they wreak havoc with the rest of society…?
Pretty please? With sugar on top…?
That’s why I thought it might be a hoax or wayward Onion riff.
And sorry about the “SoCal”, I didn’t mean all of southern California, but figured I needed some kind of geographic reference in the thread title.
Hell, I did research in our home encyclopedias before my first, uh, experiments, to figure out what exactly was supposed to happen.
Doesn’t sound like a hoax to me. You wouldn’t believe some of the books that have been challenged or banned lately. They even (especially?) go after the classics.
They banned alphabet soup in the cafeteria because it contained the letters O, R, A, L, S, E, and X.
Next they’ll ban calculators since you can type the word boobies on them (5318008). Not that we did that when we were kids, of course.
And you were expected to swallow it!
Ban alphabet soup? Bah! They should just ban the alphabet in schools altogether! No telling what those kids will try to spell.
I was suspicious when I read that one person involved is Betti Cadmus – Cadmus is the founder of Thebes in greek mythology, and I’ve never heard it used as a last name. And one father is named Jason.
But the story’s running in other newspapers, including LA Times
So it looks as if it’s legit. Utterly Amazing.
Does anyone know what this shockingly explicit definition for “Oral Sex” is that’s causing all the ruckus?
According to the link, the dictionary’s “online definition” of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. So if it’s on line, does that mean the little ones are banned from the internet??? Good luck with that.