America Online disabled its online thesaurus and Merriam Webster issued an apology after a reader discovered an entry containing offensive words describing homosexuality. The entry is no longer to be included in the on-line version, and will be excised from future print editions as well. The same reader later complained that the thesaurus entry for "Christian" lists "pious" and "decorous" as synonyms.

[Ed.: A similar fuss from about a year ago hinged around the question of whether the word "nigger" was, as Merriam-Webster insisted, an improper noun, or whether it repesented a brand new word form: an inflammatory racist epithet, one than can never function legitimately in a sentence as a noun.]

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