The more I heard about G.P. Taylor's cheeky language, the more I wondered what Barry Yourgrau, whose NASTYbook succeeds by giving kids just that kind of irreverent grossness, would make of the situation. So I shot him an email and asked him, and he was kind enough to tear himself away from a deadline to answer.

"My own recollection of school daze was that the worst hindrances to growing up human and lively were teachers," Yourgrau writes. "This bum-crap outrage is just another sorry installment in the long sorry history of 'instruction' and order-keeping. But I must say I do feel a twinge of sympathy for anyone trying to handle an auditorium's worth of pubescents among whom such words have been let loose. Lively and provocative authors are like frisky uncles who show up and throw the household into an uproar--and then leave mom and dad to do the grind work of regular life--but surely a teacher can handle these things with grace, as opposed to ordering an author off the premises."