What A Dic-tionary!

A California school district has added a new book to the controversial list of literature that is considered unfit for young eyes - the dictionary.

The Golden State's Menifee Union School District has yanked all copies of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary from its shelves and is investigating the classic American text for containing "age-inappropriate" words.

The trouble started when an inquisitive student got lost somewhere between "oralism" and "orang" and found a rather recent entry to the lexicon: "oral sex," a phrase that has been in common parlance since 1973 but still makes many parents fairly hot under the collar.

A parent at Oak Meadows Elementary School complained about a child finding the definition, which reads, rather clinically: "oral stimulation of the genitals."

Menifee, which is composed of 9,000 students between kindergarten and 8th grade, is forming a committee of principals, teachers and parents to pore over the book and determine whether it's fit for young eyes. It could take a while: the unabridged edition available online contains over 470,000 entries.

As they do their work, free speech advocates are getting worked up over what they call needless and harmful censorship.

"If a public school were to remove every book because it contains one word deemed objectionable to some parent, then there would be no books at all in our public libraries," said Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, in an interview with the California Press-Enterprise.