Here.
Full explanation here.
Pointers are from BookSlut and Yana. What words do you wish to purge from your library?
A list of children’s books which contain the word “scrotum”
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You should have a disclaimer for that link. It was more painful reading some of those sentences using the word “scrotum” than it was to watch that video of the tiger eating the sheep in the previous post …
I thought about this for a bit and decided that the key line from the Times article is “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.†
Honestly, this is probably enough to keep the book out of required reading lists for good. Would you want to be in that position?
Tyler makes his opinion on the subject known by including this post on this family blog.
This reminds me of how when I was in high school marching band, the drum majors would always read us “The Original Warm Fuzzy Tale” by Claude Steiner. It’s not a very good children’s book, as my creative writing class ruled, and it just sounds like a dirty allegory. Apparently nobody that reviewed it on Amazon thought that way; maybe they just weren’t in marching band. Here’s the Amazon page for it:
http://tinyurl.com/ytfqyw
People are killing themselve in children tv show; bloods spills everywhere in kid’s movies; there is horrible sex stories on newspaper frontpage BUT please don’t speak about scrotum in school.
You’re right.
To answer your question Tyler, I first thought I don’t
want to purge any word, because I prefer being at least
somewhat open minded, but the more I think about it, I
like to purge: born-again, Britney, and Berlusconi. But
my guess is that none of these are currently in my
library. And let’s just keep it that way!
When my children were in school I came to associate Newberry Award winning
books with junk.
Is this what passes for writing these days? Yuck!
Some of the quotes from that page were quite heartening actually. I am glad to know that kids still read about kids who have horses and vets and gritty animal stories and all that. For urban kids its about as close to a real childhood as you get sometimes, and as close as some people ever get to nature!
That is probably the best way for kids to learn about bodies and nature and health and life and death and all those things.
When I first saw the complaints I thought “why would anyone need to stick that word into a children’s book?” but looking at that list, I must say that its probably a pretty important word for authors of children’s books.
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thank you very much for this article
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