The Newbery winner this year has the word scrotum on the first page. I bought the book on Friday but haven't cracked it open yet. Then I read in the NYT today about the author's inclusion of the word scrotum: "The book's heroine, a scrappy 10 year old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum." Come to find out, librarians are not ordering the book because they don't think kids should read the word scrotum. Isn't that odd? I want to read the article with the sixers and cincos. We've been talking about the power of words. Scrotum never seemed very powerful to me before, but I guess others think differently. When I read the sentence my first thought wasn't, "OMG, scrotum!" But instead, "Roy! Great name for a dog!"
