Balls, scrotes, vaginas, roscoe rules, censorship.

"An award-winning children's book about a 10-year-old girl seeking answers about life has provoked an uproar in America because it uses the word 'scrotum' on the first page.

Susan Patron's 'The Higher Power of Lucky' is being barred from school libraries in parts of the country - even though the actual reference is to the scrotum of a dog.

The book won America's top children's book award, the Newbery Medal."

Coming very swiftly along behind the recent waffle and spit over the Vagina Monologes -the play title was changed briefly to the 'Hoohaa' Monologes at the request of some one who perhaps didn't realise vaginas were a natural occuring body part and therefore not 'yuccky'- libraries all over America are getting busy and whipping up storm of protest over the inclusion of this most offensive of words, 'scrotum'.

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.
Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

“The word is just so delicious,” Ms. Patron said. “The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of “The Higher Power of Lucky” is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it."

Which is rather like saying only pigs and spiders really want to read about Charlotte's Web. Or that an adult might not be interested in Oliver Twist.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

No no, God forbid a child might learn that the old ballbag is actually called a scrotum, let's stick with peepee and goolies or doodysack or whatever other nonsensical word we can find. Let's not mention vagina at all or... oh I don't know, toes. I'm going to call my toes feet fingers from now on.
Actually kids, being kids, like nothing more than reading books that adults tell them they shouldn't be reading, so carry on banning and getting offended over nothing, draw as much possible attention to it in fact.
Now, I really must get on, my stomach-er..interier food recycler, is rumbling and this post is starting to get on my dirty pillows.