Far be it for me to make assumptions, but I’m going to go ahead and assume that a few of you reading this website have children. If this is the case, I need you to do something for me. Right now, go into your child’s bedroom and look underneath their mattress. There will probably be several periodicals hidden underneath it. Of the items you find, the one in particular you should be looking for looks like this:

If you see this book, BURN IT IMMEDIATELY AND SEND IT BACK TO HELL. That book has something in that can have a profoundly negative impact on young minds – words. Because it turns out that words can sometimes be bad, and if you expose a child to bad words, they will turn into actual demons. With pitchforks. And those things are really sharp.

So it’s good to see there’s other people out there as considered about the negative influence dictionaries are having on today’s youth as I am. Because if this newspaper article had not confirmed this fact, I might have started to believe that I was the one who was bat shit crazy.

Now were it me, I would probably be a bit more concerned less with the child’s act of looking up the definition of “oral sex” as much as I would be what the child then plans on doing after reading the definition. Because it’s a pretty good bet that if I’m looking up the definition of, say, “money laundering,” there’s a fairly decent chance that sometime later that day I’m going to attempt to make myself rich, rich, rich!

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.

Damn you, Merriam Webster and your lewdness. Everyone knows the more family friendly term for oral sex is “peepee kissing.” At least that’s how they referred to it on Barney & Friends last week.

The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

I cannot begin to tell you how amused I am by the idea of Betti Cadmus and the rest of the Menifee school district board sitting and reading through the entire dictionary looking for more words of a graphic nature. The idea of this actually happening is pleasing to me.

While some parents have praised the move – “[it's] a prestigious dictionary that’s used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern,” said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. “It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground,” father Jason Rogers told local press. “You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?”

Actually, yeah. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. Because if we get rid of the definitions for words like penis and vagina, logic dictates that these things will cease to exist. And when we no longer have genitals, everyone will be on their best behavior. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this plan.

So what have we learned today? Not much. Just that the only proper way to protect our children is to destroy knowledge once and for all. So three cheers for this little school district, for doing what we as a country have been too scared to do to this point – get rid of the dictionary. Because in America, you want to know what oral sex is, you look it up on Google just like the rest of us.