I saw there was a new feature when looking at Neil's blog earlier today which is quite nice (only from 12.1.0.2)
https://chandlerdba.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/locking-privileges-in-oracle/
It's been missing for a while, though personally it's never really caused an issue - nice that it is solved though.
When i clicked through to look at the oracle docs though i found this little snippet of code further down
GRANT REFERENCES (employee_id),
UPDATE (employee_id, salary, commission_pct)
ON hr.employees
TO oe;
Hmm - that's interesting i thought i didn't think you could do that (granting access just on specific columns) - but no mention that it was new so I started looking back in the docs - i got back as far as 8i (seems they didn't digitize the papyrus of v8 and earlier yet - at least not that i could find). And guess what it's been there all this time and it's completely passed me by - shows the importance of reading the docs when new stuff comes even if it's to pick up stuff you should have known 20 years ago.......