The Lexicographer's Rules

Wake County school officials revised their book-use policy Tuesday which could lead to some popular and classic books being banned from their public schools.…Called2Action, a local Christian activist group, and some parents…[complained[ that the books contain “vulgar and sexually explicit language."…School officials said five books were formally challenged this school year, including…"Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang” by Jonathon Green.

Oh, Green’s dictionary definitely contains vulgar and sexually explicit language. But you don’t ban such books. You buy more copies and spread them around. Children are desperate for a resource they can go to for matter-of-fact answers about what words really mean. They may very well browse and learn some new terms, but where’s the harm in that? I learned all of mine on the school bus, reading my sisters’ torrid romance novels, and from my parents. A child only really has to hear his father say “motherfucker” once for it to take a permanent place in his brain. (It was 1983, Dad, and you were putting up the television aerial on the concrete steps out back of the house.)

Banning a book is a sure way to boost a book’s sales. I love when bookstores and libraries have banned book week.

I explicitly remember picking up “fuck you” from a certain pair of boys whose house I used to visit.  We would shout it at each other with glee. I enjoyed listening to the earthy Anglo-Saxon labiodental fricative followed by the abrupt velar stop (go up to any youngin and make an “f” or “sh” sound, and in either case they’ll know exactly how to finish it.  It’s as though it were hardwired into our Germanic-speaking minds).  It was only when the mother reproached me (oddly she didn’t scold her sons) that I realized what it was that I was saying. I felt at the time that I was being accused of crime I knew nothing about.  After all, it wasn’t the word that was dirty, but the meaning that the adults wanted to pin on it.

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