Central Bucks’ book ban policy is rife with weak language. Is that the explicit point?

When is the word explicit not explicit?

When you’re being educated in the Central Bucks School District.

Our local fascist laboratory recently made remarkable strides in making Pennsylvania into the Florida of the North when it released reports on the latest books it’s banning in Superintendent Abram M. Lucabaugh’s crusade against literacy. The reports — unlike any books you’re likely to find in Central Bucks’ school libraries — are revealing … especially in their use of language.

When Florida paved the way with its “Don’t Say Gay” bill, it used weak verbs as a way to intimidate and confuse educators about what they could teach. Central Bucks, ever the innovators, have opted for weak adjectives.

Two books the school district decided to ban, Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, were both dinged by the district’s Orwellian-sounding “Reconsideration Committee” for violating Central Bucks’ 2022 policy, which states: “No materials in high school libraries shall contain … explicit written descriptions of sexual acts.”

» READ MORE: Central Bucks orders removal of ‘Gender Queer,’ ‘This Book is Gay’ from school library shelves

The first two dictionary definitions of explicit reveal just how vague this pernicious policy is.

Explicit’s 1a definition in Merriam-Webster begins: “fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity: leaving no question as to meaning or intent.” But then 1b, just below, takes a very different turn: “open in the depiction of nudity or sexuality.”

Which was Central Bucks going for — explicit as in unambiguous, or explicit as in sexual?

Consider the innocuous stand-alone sentence: “They had intercourse.” A quick search of Google Books finds that it crops up in hundreds of titles, including George Aaron Barton’s 1916 book Archaeology and the Bible and David Weiss Halivni’s 2013 bodice ripper The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud. It’s an explicit — as in “expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity” — written description of a sexual act: namely, sex.

But is it “open in the depiction of nudity or sexuality”? If you’re applying U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” standard to pornography, it seems unlikely to qualify, as it would be hard to make a sexual act sound more clinical.

Whether Central Bucks would feel compelled to ban a book with the sentence “They had intercourse” would depend on which dictionary definition it’s using. But the policy is not, ahem, explicit. As with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, the vagueness is the point.

The vagueness is the point.

The Reconsideration Committee (yep, still sounds creepy even on second mention) has evaluated just five books so far, and the other three — Jesse Andrews’ Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Susan Kuklin’s Beyond Magenta, and Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy — were all spared the executioners’ wrath.

Or were they? Although the committee’s reports list all three titles accurately, the school district’s log of “Requests for Reconsideration of Library Material” lists Andrews’ book as Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl — omitting an and and adding a couple of noxious commas. The same list also misspells four authors’ names (Sara Gruen, Sapphire [not Saffire], Ashley Hope Pérez, and Kacen Callender), adds an errant Oxford comma to Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, mistakes the author of Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, and leaves the crucial ellipsis off of Judy Blume’s novel Forever…

It’s like they’re not even paying attention to these books that they’re ripping out of libraries.

You know what helps with attention to details like that? Reading more, not less.

Sadly, the Central Bucks School District has made clear that a love of reading is one thing it’s not the least bit interested in instilling in its students.

If it’s not careful, those students will grow up to be just as ignorant and closed-minded as the so-called adults running the place now.

Or maybe that’s the explicit point.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and coordinate adjectives to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.