“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

This appears on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal. Libraries, it seems, are refusing to stock it because of the use of the word "scrotum."

What else should Patron have said here? The word appears when Lucky, the ten-year-old heroine, overhears someone say he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog Roy on the scrotum.

The only alternative would have been, "That snake bit Roy in the balls!"

Some people. :-)