Dictionary

Kieran’s notes from the back room : I was looking over the American Library Association’s list of Frequently Challenged Books the other day. I also followed a link online to an article in the Huffington Post titled, “The 11 Most Surprising Banned Books”. I am always surprised when someone wants a book banned. (I mean if you don’t like it, well then, don’t read it.) One of the more surprising books on the list was the dictionary. I guess some folks don’t want to have the ‘naughty’ words defined. When I read the paragraph a school board in California used to justify banning the dictionary, I thought back to my fifth grade year and wished our school board had done something similar, that way I could have gotten out of all that vocabulary homework! I also thought back to a history class I had once and remembered a story:

A long time ago (1933), not so very far away (Massachusetts ), Helen Keller, who had overcome her deafness and blindness to become a respected writer, was told about an event that was happening in Germany on the night of May 10, 1933. On that night, Nazis raided libraries and bookstores across Germany. They marched by torchlight and threw books into huge bonfires. More than 25,000 books were burned, including Keller’s book, “The Story of My Life”. Helen Keller responded, “Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.”

Helen Keller may not have been able to see, but she sure had insight. Of course, perhaps that school board was doing a sneaky reverse psychology thing. Telling the kids the dictionary was off limits surely made a few kids read the whole thing cover-to-cover. That is one of the reasons I love Banned Book Week… those books fly off the shelf! To see the display of the 11 Most Surprising Banned Books, come on in to the John C. We got them right out on the table… dictionary and all. Then you can come back to the back room and tell me your favorite word in the dictionary.