Blame it on the word!
The headline -- page 1 in the New
York Times, 2/18/07 -- reported:
With
One Word,
Children's Book
Sets Off Uproar
In the jump on page 23, a bolded inset summarizes the story:
Teachers,
authors and
librarians take sides
over a story that
names a body part.
The body part in question is the scrotum, and the word scrotum appears on the very first
page of The Higher Power of Lucky,
by Susan Patron, who won a Newbery Medal for the book. The
10-year-old protagonist Lucky "heard the word through a hole in a wall
when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog ... on
the scrotum", as Julie Bosman writes in the NYT piece.
Wait, wait! The WORD is the problem?
Language is right out there on the front lines. We get to
thoughts, ideas, concepts, proposals, beliefs, recollections, etc.
through what's spoken or written. So when there's a problem,
we're inclined to blame the language. In this case, it's
definitely a bum rap.
The problem isn't the
WORD scrotum. The problem is
referring to this body part at all.
There aren't a lot of choices here. In plain language, there's
nutsack/nut-sack/nut sack (815,000
Google webhits) and the variant spellings
nutsac/nut-sac/nut sac (55,000
hits). (The Latin-derived medical term
scrotum gets 1,460,000 hits, by the
way.) And there's the metonymic alternative
balls. But these alternatives
would not have done in a children's book. There are less specific
terms she might have chosen, for example the euphemistic
private parts or
privates or the medical
genitals or
genitalia, but since these are less
specific they are are also less informative
.
Patron is reported as saying, in Bosman's words, that "one of the
themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up"
and that "learning about language and body parts ... is very important
to her." Patron says of
scrotum:
"The word is just so delicious". (Perhaps because it combines the
initial sound-symbolic
scr-
of
scratch,
scrape, etc. with the elevated
-otum of
factotum and
-tum of
quantum,
sanctum, etc.)
So she chose the topic (basing her account on a true incident involving
a friend's dog), and then selected the most accurate term that wasn't
street talk. And librarians around the country balked at stocking
the book on their shelves, despite the Newbery Medal.
All except one of the librarians Bosman quotes blame the word:
"If I were a third- or fourth-grade
teacher, I wouldn't want to have to explain that."
"I don't think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary
lesson." [Nice example of subject myself
for my collection of remarkable reflexives.]
"Sad to say, I didn't order it for either of my schools, based on 'the
word.' "
One of them eventually gets the point. She's quoted first as
issuing a general complaint:
"This book included what I call a
Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push
the envelope, but they didn't have the children in mind," Dana Nilsson,
a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing
list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. "How very sad."
But in a quotation at the end of the article, she blames the thing
referred to and not the word that refers to it:
Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside
Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of
librarians who agreed with her stance. "I don't want to start an issue
about censorship," she said. "But you won't find men's genitalia in
quality literature."
"At least not for children," she added.
I'd imagine that the people objecting to the passage in Patron's book
would not be satisfied if Patron altered "on the scrotum" to "on the
genitals" or "on his genitalia". You'd still have men's genitalia
in children's lit, and you'd still have something to explain to the
kiddies.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Note added by Geoff Pullum:
See Gelf Magazine's
Gelf
Log for some textual evidence that in fact literature for young
people has repeatedly had references to scrotums in the past
(hat tip to
Susie Bright's Journal).
The crazies who are prudishness to new extremes of looniness
in this country are not representatives of tradition.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 25, 2007 01:36 PM