So, a question was born in my mind today. I have to thank the thoughtful posters at Salon's Broadsheet, for playing stork. My question-baby is related to the great post, "The Dictionary: Too hot for fourth grade?"

Posted earlier today (and by that I mean several hours earlier from where I sit in Central Standard Time land), this tale of banning books landed on Broadsheet because the reason a parent asked for the California school in question to remove it relates to sexual terms.

No more oral sex, you young whippersnappers!

Okay, okay, my question baby needs to burp so I'll cut to the chase. My dear readers are perfectly capable of reading Mary Elizabeth Williams's post.

So, my squalling question whimpers this: If we're going to ban the Dictionary - in this case, Merriam Webster's 10th Edition - shouldn't we consider banning that partner in crime - the Thesaurus? Doesn't it contain naughty words too, for those of use looking up synonyms and other get-your-freak-on lingo?

Considering that most fourth graders don't have fully developed vocabularies (and in this age of texting less of one than we might hope for), wouldn't it stand to reason a teacher might send an innocent child to the Thesaurus where their naive eyes would be hopelessly corrupted and agog at some synonym for humping? (Cut to horror-stricken Jimmy staring dumbly at said book)

I decided to experiment. (Bad, bad young lady, right? At least that's what Arlen Specter might call me.)

Not having a Thesaurus handy, I had to resort to the computer version found in Microsoft Word.

So, I start to type. (Feel free, gentle readers, to yell out appropriate experimental terms.)

The version provided on Microsoft Word claims to be Standard English.

Surely I could find objectionable terms there.

Experiment word one: Humping.

Result: No match.

Experiment word two: Oral sex. This was the word the parent found offensive in the Broadsheet post.

Result: No match.

Experiment word three: Cunt. (Something must come up, right? This is modern English. Hell, even Chaucer knew this one.)

Result: No match.

(Okay, puzzled, frustrated breath)

Experiment word four: (this has got to get a match) Sex.

(The mother of all censorship and morality angst)

Results: (Success?!) Gender, sexual category, sexual characteristics, masculinity, femininity.

(With a couple of those, am I not getting a chicken and the egg vibe?)

It seems I have answered my own question.

Or, at least got it napping.

At least where the computer tool is concerned there is nothing ban worthy about the usual dictionary companion book.

But, my question baby isn't quite put to rest. It's still whimpering. I have to wonder, as I continue on my banned book quest, what the lack of inclusion for those words means overall.

Is a Thesaurus that lacks words like "oral sex" and even fails to find a synonym for "sex," beyond using it redundantly, really a great tool for understanding the modern world of English?

Do we do a disservice sanitizing our online tools and classroom tools by removing those words from a Thesaurus or worse, removing a dictionary in an age of texting?

Can a person truly understand a language properly if there aren't words for something this basic and primal?

Thoughts anyone?