Dirty Words

Subscribers to the FIMP Book of the Month Club will soon be receiving "Dirty Words" in their mailbox. Fortunately the opaque envelope the book is mailed in will hide it from the neighbors, preventing subscriber embarrassment.

This month's book, besides being an excuse for me to put a "wiener" on the cover, was a response to the ban by the Menifee Union School District of the smut-filled Merriam Webster's 10th edition dictionary from its elementary schools. Apparently nobody pointed out to these officials that a kid generally has to have encountered a term in another context before looking it up in the dictionary. Odds are Merriam Webster's definition of "oral sex" ("oral stimulation of the genitals", in case you're curious and don't have the dictionary handy) is a lot less exciting than whatever sent the inquiring student to the library in the first place. If there is a problem, it's probably not with the dictionary.

Now in all fairness, and I do mention this in the book, the school district in question has eased up on its ban, now allowing parents to "opt out" of allowing their children access to the dictionary. My understanding is that they are also considering allowing children to opt out of learning the alphabet, as it was pointed out at the recent school board meeting that any number of obscenities can be written by an innocent student once he or she is given access to the letters by which they are spelled.

All that said, this month's book was really just an excuse for me to indulge in some puerile potty humor, for which I am rightfully ashamed.