Nick Ascroft concludes his two-part report on the woke revolution at Scrabble
Yesterday in ReadingRoom I covered how Mattel bravely announced it was cutting offensive slurs from the official Scrabble word list (as published by their licensee Collins). Throughout it, you were thinking, "What are the 419 offensive words then?"
Let’s cut to the chase. You don’t want to hear the politics of a toy company and a game players’ association; you want to be shocked by the terrible words that have been cut. So I’ll discuss some of the slurs here. A note for the faint-hearted, I’ll be talking about some of the most offensive words in the language, so if you don’t want to hear such things, read no further. Better still, keep reading and then @ me in an outraged tweet. (My one disclaimer is that Part 1 should be read first for the context, and my position on why words are not in themselves hate speech.)
Blithe old Collins have jumped the gun and already updated their word-checking tool online to show what will become the new official list with all the offending words cut. (You can find it here with a strange image of Scrabble tiles with incorrect points values on them.) So some egghead on Reddit automated a few hundred thousand requests to it, i.e. the complete word list as it was, and was able to definitively compile all 419 of the excisions. Here is the Reddit post with a link to the text file.
If a word is an ethnic slur, but has no other meaning, it has been cut. This leaves quite a few ethnic slurs – in fact some of the worst – that also mean something anodyne
I too had been methodically typing the worst of all possible words into their checker app to see if they were still there. Collins for the most part have been very consistent in their approach. If a word is an ethnic slur, but has no other meaning, it has been cut. This leaves quite a few ethnic slurs – in fact some of the worst – that also mean something anodyne. CHINK ("our glasses chink together"), CHINKY ("the chinky sound of glasses coming together") and GOOK ("all the gloop and gook that clogs up the dishwasher") remain. This alone, to my mind, invalidates their approach.
Nevertheless, some of the most taboo words in English have been cut too. The N-word and its derivatives are gone. I won’t discuss this word further. For South Africans there is a word considered more offensive still, which you can be prosecuted for using there. That is, the K-word, and it and its alphabetical neighbours have been cut too.
Interestingly, one of the largest sets of slurs cut are those directed at white people. Sure, many of the words also have connotations of uneducated provincial bozo or are defined in opposition to Latino, Jewish or black identity. HONKY, PECKERWOOD, BUBBA, CRACKA, GOY, GRINGO, HAOLE, OFAY, REDNECK, SHEGETZ, SHICKSA, WHITEYS and WIGGA have all been cut. You’ll note an American perspective. CHAV remains for instance. As do FARANG and GAIJIN. And of course PALAGI and PAKEHA, not that New Zealanders consider these as slurs. But as far as I can tell HAOLE has a similar status in Hawaii to PALAGI. You can use it in a derogatory context, or it can just mean ‘white person’.
My reaction here is: poor white people. Did someone take the classic chestnut ‘reverse racism’ seriously?
A similar politically incorrect negative that has gotten the boot is NONHANDICAPPED. That’s not really a slur is it?
The slur words for Catholics feel similar, and the fact that there are so many reflects previous tensions in English history as opposed to current prejudice or sectarianism. Do we need to be protected from the word PAPIST, or for that matter NONPAPIST. Both have been cut. A similar politically incorrect negative that has gotten the boot is NONHANDICAPPED. That’s not really a slur is it?
Slurs relating to sexuality are the next biggest set. Again inoffensive homographs keep some of the big-hitters in play. Google "pork faggots" and you’ll be surprised to see a lot of recipes for meatballs and gravy for unshocked Britons. Dykes are what keep the Netherlands out of the sea. These two words remain playable. Adjectival derivatives that relate only to the offensive meanings however have been cut. For the most part this has been consistent, so I have to assume it is a choice that DYKON stays in, being a portmanteau of DYKE and ICON, an icon to lesbians. I’d like to think the lexicographers were enlightened enough to see this as a reclaimed usage, as groan-worthy as it is.
You are okay to keep playing F**K, C**T, SHITBAG and the like. But not COCKSUCKER because it is seen as a gay slur
Two words in this category should not have been cut. The first is QUEERDOM. The word QUEER is the most reclaimed word there is, and not only is it used proudly in self-reference, but those of us who are less queer feel happy to use it positively. So QUEERDOM feels a cool word rather than a slur and shouldn’t have been cut. The other word is COCKSUCKER. Jiminy Cricket! But yes, all the other so-called vulgar slang words have not been cut. You are okay to keep playing F**K, C**T, SHITBAG and the like. But not COCKSUCKER because it is seen as a gay slur. Surely this word has outgrown any homophobic origin it may or may not have had. In most cases it just means a contemptible person, doesn’t it? In the recent TV series The Undoing, Donald Sutherland has the great line: "I am an old-fashioned cocksucker, and by that I do not mean the homosexual belittlement." This was the first I realised the word could be used that way. And God forbid if anyone was ever to perform fellatio. What an insult.
At slur words relating to transgender women and men, the lexicographers making the expurgations seem to have run out of gas a little. SHEMALE is gone, but LADYBOY remains. As do TRANNY and TRANNIE, generally considered no-go terrain these days, but they are both defined as shortenings of ‘transistor radio’.
When we get to slur words for women, the gas tank is bone dry. While some of the most offensive words for women have that saving neutral homograph – I’m thinking of SLAG and BITCH – others are clearly words whose only function is as a slur. I give you the allowable words SLUT, SUPERBITCH, FEMINAZI, BIMBO and MILF. In fact I can find no slur word for women that has been cut from the word list. Women are a bridge too far. (Oh! Hold on, BINT has been cut. Weird.) Slurs relating to disabilities and mental illness get similar scattershot coverage. ASPIE is out, despite much loving usage. And while SCHIZO has gone, the everyday slurs for the mentally ill remain kosher: NUTJOB, NUTCASE, WACKO, LUNATIC. The homeless as ever get bupkis. DERO (Aussie slang for a ‘derelict’) came in recently and has not been cut.
To be sure you don’t get the wrong end of the stick, especially if you work for Mattel, my point is not that these words should have been cut from the Scrabble dictionary, but that attempting to remove the offence from the English language is a Sisyphean task. Scrabble is a dictionary-based game. Proper nouns and words with punctuation in them are not allowed. These are easy to define. Slur words are not. Dictionaries do not signal them in any consistent way.
Despite this, Collins has given some clear scope to their work and performed admirably. But what was the point? Mattel had declared they were stopping hate speech from being used in Scrabble. The hateful words remain playable. In fact, even if Scrabble is banned entirely, even if dictionaries are banned, the ugliness remains in the world. The language reflects the culture. It holds up a horrible mirror. If we accept the role of dictionaries in reporting the language as it exists, and not as we might wish it was, it is not a stretch to accept that Scrabble players will play a game based on those dictionaries.
