I AGREE WITH ALL THESE SCHOOL LIBRARIANS around the country who are banning an award winning children's book from their stacks because of the use of a certain word on the book's first page. The word involved is scrotum and I think that just about sums up all the reasons why.

The author of the book. Susan Patron, is shocked that such a fuss is being made about her use of perhaps the most clincally precise, not to mention universally repulsive, word there is to decribe a man's junk or a boy's woo-woo. There are lots of words I don't want my children to hear, let alone know the meaning of, until they are of an intellectually responsible and less vulnerable age. Preferably in their early thirties. This would depend upon whether I'd actually have to hear my child say the word in my presence.

You wouldn't believe how many common words a determined father can deny hearing in the company of his young children. The word nigger for instance my youngest daughter heard for the first time when she was three years old from the lips of a boy maybe twice her age standing in front of us in line at McDonalds. I remember it well because my heart stopped beating and all I could hear was the silence that followed. Awkward, with a frozen smile on my face, I stood waiting for the inevitable question from a precocious child who hadn't missed a word, seemingly since birth. She delivered as if on cue. With a serious look on her face, she looked up to me and said, "Daddy, what's in the Happy Meal?"

Lub. . .DUB! Lub-DUB! Lub-Dub. . . Just like that, it all came back. Pulse. Consciousness. Reality. The whole catastrophe. I had dodged a bullet, but for how long? When would my little girl's heart be broken, or worse, hardened by the power of words to intimidate and strike fear in the souls of innocents? That day arrived sooner than I dared imagine.

We were in the car driving home after a day at the beach. "Daddy," my daughter said with that same adorable serious look on her face, "my vagina hurts." I didn't exactly swallow my tongue, but that option seemed tempting. With the calm steady measured tone of a panic-stricken parent speaking to a dazed child who seems about to step off a roof, I inquired, "Why's that, honey? And my daughter answered, "There's sand in my bottom." Well, why didn't she just say so in the first place?