Florida schools banned the dictionary. (Yes, you read that right.) | The Grammarian - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Dictionary

There are plenty of reasons to be glad Gov. Ron DeSantis gave up running for president.

First on the list: Now he can go back home to Florida and return to the important work of banning dictionaries.

Yes, that’s actually happening.

That’s actually happening.

In response to laws passed last year in Florida, the School District of Escambia County — which includes Pensacola, in the state’s northwest corner — removed more than 1,600 books from school libraries and placed them into storage.

Included in that sequester: Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary, The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, and Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students.

Also on the list: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

While Florida has passed plenty of problematic legislation in recent years, the current controversy is a result of the state’s HB 1069, which prescribes what Florida students learn related to sex and gender (ideally: nothing at all) and how they learn it (ideally: while wearing potato sacks and puritan bonnets).

In June, a month after DeSantis signed the bill, the School District of Escambia County decided “to adopt emergency rules necessitated by a danger to health, safety, and welfare.” Pending further review, it removed every book it could think of that might give students … information?

One could give Escambia County credit for comprehensiveness: What adolescent hasn’t endeavored their own sex ed by consulting the dictionary?

As with much terrible legislation, the problem lies with the law’s lack of precision. Also: the fact that it simply makes up what it wants certain words to mean.

That’s not how language works.

The opening lines of the bill define the word sex as “the classification of a person as either female or male based on the organization of the body of such person for a specific reproductive role, as indicated by the person’s sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, and internal and external genitalia present at birth.”

No reputable dictionary defines sex that narrowly. Neither the Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford English Dictionary definition is what anyone would consider radical wokeism, but, like any dictionary, both contain multiple definitions that encompass the ways that sex appears in our lexicon.

Lawmakers don’t get to decide words’ definitions. Neither do school boards, failed presidential candidates, or even grammar columnists.

From there, HB 1069 places all sorts of restrictions on how people talk about and reference sexual classification — all of them meant to squeeze discussion of sex into a “traditional” binary. It’s hard to say which is worse: when the law is vague and calls into question “any material … which … depicts or describes sexual content,” or when it’s hyper-specific and mandates such instruction as “teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.”

» READ MORE: Defining ‘woman’ is complicated for everyone, including Supreme Court nominees | The Grammarian

Dictating language use from the top down is never wise. Even if someone were to try to do so, it would be a job for linguists and lexicographers — not the Florida Legislature. But those linguists and lexicographers are smart enough to know not to try.

The slightly good news is that, after a round of review, the district appears to have removed the dictionaries from its list of banned books; presumably, students are once again allowed to look up definitions. No such luck for Anne Frank, Malcolm X, William Golding, or Ernest Hemingway, all of whom are among the hundreds of books still pending approval.

It would do DeSantis some good to read a few of the books on that list. Lucky for him, he should have some free time now.

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

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