For my Dictionary of the Week entries, I always check to see if a dictionary has obscenities. It seems useful to know whether a dictionary is reflecting the full range of a language or just, you know, the nice words. I suspect a lot of foreign language dictionaries are edited with schools in mind, because many of mine don’t seem to have obscenities.

A school district in southern California has pulled all copies of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., from schools because it defines “oral sex.” (Oh god, what kind of google traffic is that going to bring to my blog?) A parent complained that their elementary-school kid had stumbled across that entry. It sounds from the newspaper story like this dictionary was only in fourth-grade classrooms and up, for the use of advanced readers.

First: “Stumbled across”? Yeah, right. Next: Let’s consult my dictionary collection. I hadn’t thought to look for this particular term in my dictionaries before, ’cause it’s not really a bad word. So I just checked the two English dictionaries on the shelf next to me, and neither includes it, but they both have synonyms.

Here’s the story from the local paper, the Press-Enterprise. In another story, a school district spokeswoman says school officials are going to be reviewing the dictionaries by looking for other objectionable terms, which is kind of a funny mental image.