Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Censorh*, Censorsi* (for Censorship)

Happy Banned Books Week. I hope that you're all out there celebrating your right to read, elevating worthy work that's being ignored or suppressed, and thumbing your collective noses at censorship. We all have our favorite examples of book banning. (Children's book author Laurie Halse Anderson, who will be visiting a young relative's school shortly, has posted this alarm about the attempted censorship of her young adult novel Speak.) During the 1990s and early aughts, I edited the New York Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Round Table newsletter, Pressure Point. For some reason, I often found myself mistyping the word censorship as Cesnorship, transposing the N and the S. While I did not find much evidence of other catalogers doing the same (nothing in OhioLINK), you might want to check your records anyway. (I got exactly one hit in WorldCat: Cesnores Regios.) I also found two cases of Censorh* and one of Censorsi* in OhioLINK this morning. There are many ways to fight "censorship" (which I put in quotation marks in order to include its many unofficial forms), but making sure the word is spelled correctly in our catalogs is certainly one of them.

(Censored text block, by antonella.beccaria, August 30, 2009, from Flickr.)

Carol Reid

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