Words like "pee-pee," "wee-wee," and "privates" have always bothered me.

Perhaps it comes from my background in which the use of such euphemisms for genitalia was laughable.

Perhaps it comes from the fact that one of my favorite stories growing up involved my brother informing a teacher of the proper term for the male reproductive organ.

"It's called 'a penis'," he said with all seriousness and decorum.

He was probably seven years old.

That is why the case of The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron strikes me as no less sad and hilarious.

This year's Newberry Medal-winner (the most prestigious award for children's literature), The Higher Power of Lucky has caused quite a stir in the halls and offices of school libraries and is now being banned by a handful of schools throughout the nation.

Why, you ask? Did the young main character experience some form of sexual abuse? Did the book glorify sex or violence in some way? Did it involve an untempered allusion to homosexuality, which has caused so many children's books to be banned and questioned in the past?

Nope.

According to The New York Times, the book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old named Lucky Trimble, merely hears through a hole in the wall that another character's dog has been bitten by a rattlesnake on the scrotum.

That's right, the scrotum.

Perhaps not the most appropriate term to bring up in polite conversation, the term scrotum is the correct medical term for "the external pouch of skin and muscle containing the testes in mammals," and based on searches of several renowned dictionaries, has no apparent negative or derogatory connotation. Certainly, libraries have provided these children with dictionaries, and along with the word "scrotum" are far less appropriate dictionary entries for many similar body parts. Go figure.

And yet, according to The New York Times, the book is banned or under consideration for being banned in many of the nation's public schools that will receive the book automatically as a condition of its status as a Newberry Award-winner.

Pardon my skepticism, but maybe we should be worried about more serious problems affecting our nine-to-12-year-olds (to which the book is geared) — such as basic literacy, which report after report by the federal government has targeted as a serious problem for our nation's youth.

Or, perhaps, the fact that a recent No Child Left Behind Act study labeled a majority of our nation's youth as "information-illiterate" — meaning they can't tell the difference between a trustworthy Web site and one that is suspect.

And, perhaps most critically, why are we so worried about nine-to-12-year-olds reading the word scrotum in the first place?

One would hope that, by the time a child was nine years old, they would have some appropriate concept of sexuality — they've certainly seen it in movies. And, if so, that they would at least have some vague concept, if not the correct understanding, of what a scrotum is.

"This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn't have the children in mind," Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian from Durango, Colo., cited by The New York Times, wrote on LM_Net, a librarian mailing list. "How very sad."

It certainly is sad.

Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newberry Award, noted that the act of not stocking the books by librarians was nothing short of censorship.

I agree.

Not stocking a highly lauded piece of children's literature for the use of a medically appropriate term is not only silly and ill-advised, it's puritanical.

How can we expect our children to become intelligent, informed citizens if we are constantly taking books away from them and polluting their vocabularies with unclear euphemisms for their bodies?

One hopes that the librarians who seek to ban the work will wake up and smell their own hypocrisy, at least until I can mount my campaign against words like "pee-pee" and "wee-wee."

Reach columnist Maureen Trantham at trantham@thedaily.washington.edu.