The power of the scrotum

One little word has set the libarian world on its ear.

From an editorial in The New York Times:

A tempest has been brewing over a children’s book that contains a word some find naughty and unsettling. The word is scrotum. It appears only a few times in the book, “The Higher Power of Lucky,” which is recommended for grades four to six. The scrotum in question belongs to a dog, who is bitten there by a snake.

On that basis, a few queasy librarians have chosen not to order the book, even though it won the prestigious Newbery Medal. The arguments pro and con are bubbling on librarians’ message boards. The cons seem vastly outnumbered, though they have gotten a lot of attention. One likened the author, Susan Patron, to the shock-radio host Howard Stern. Another suggested that teachers reading the book aloud replace that word with “a clearing-throat noise,” a bleep in the form of an “ahem.”

All this seems like a lousy way to treat a sweet, funny book whose main character, a smart, curious 10-year-old girl named Lucky Trimble, is already wise to the power and mystery of words: “Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

Librarians all over are flinching at the furor, saying it reinforces their profession’s hated archetype: Marian the Librarian, the prig in a wet blanket. (This is the perception, but it’s nonsense; remember that Marian Paroo, played in the “Music Man” film by the lovely Shirley Jones, is the musical’s only real grown-up, a complicated professional who scandalizes River City ladies with her love of bawdy books. Chaucer! Rabelais! BAL-zac!)