I started this blog back in 2007 as a way to chronicle my exploits as a mediocre competitive Scrabble player (with the goal of becoming a better-than-mediocre player). But, life happened shortly thereafter, and I haven't played a tournament game in over a decade. I keep telling myself I'm going to get back into it one day -- and I am -- I just don't know when. Nevertheless, I still have a strong affinity for the game and the culture, so I eagerly read any Scrabble articles that cross my path.
The latest is this article by the inimitable Scrabble ambassador Stefan Fatsis. It's on a really interesting debate -- prompted by the recent protests of systemic racism and police brutality -- about whether or not slurs should be allowed in tournament Scrabble. Currently they are. You won't find them in the Scrabble dictionary, which doesn't contain any "patently offensive" words, but they are on the Official Word List used by competitive players.
The debate is similar to ones we in the crossword puzzle community have had over certain words, but there are some key differences. The first, as Stefan points out in the opening sentence of the article, is that for most competitive Scrabble players the definitions of the words are completely irrelevant. Words are only words until they qualify for inclusion on the list of valid plays. After that they become meaningless strings of characters. There have been top-rated Scrabble players who could not read or write English. In crossword puzzles, definitions (or "clues," if you will) are half the game. Words are always words, and their meanings are very relevant to the solving experience.
The second major difference is that in Crossworld there are already taboo words, ones that aren't even offensive -- ORGASM,* for example, has never appeared in a mainstream puzzle despite having grid-friendly letters -- so eliminating slurs is already a must for crossword puzzle editors (even if they don't always do a good job of it). In Scrabble World, the standard for decades has been: Every word is valid, period. So, exempting slurs would be a significant change of the norm.
*This almost certainly would have been okay in the bygone BuzzFeed, edited by Caleb Madison, but I suspect slurs still would not have been permissible. Once, I pitched an idea to Caleb for a DIRTY/CLEAN Schrödinger puzzle in which theme entries could be either "dirty" (DAMN IT) or "clean" (DARN IT). One of my suggestions was BITCH/WITCH, but he nixed it on the grounds that BITCH is too gendered in its vulgar connotation. He green-lit the idea though. But then the whole puzzle folded like a week later, and I never actually made the puzzle.
So what's the right thing for Scrabble World to do? Eliminate slurs or keep them?
My general position on things like this: Y'all go ahead and figure that out and let me know.
It's kind of a cop out, but more so it's that I don't want to speak out of pocket about derogatory terms that aren't aimed at me. I am not personally offended by slurs -- in crossword puzzles or Scrabble -- but I'm a heterosexual, middle-aged, white man. There aren't even any slurs for me. I mean, theoretically there are (HONKY and HAOLE and whatnot), but practically there aren't, because nobody ever actually uses them in a pejorative way toward me, and I never heard them growing up in my formative years, so they never enrooted in my psyche. I have the luxury of not being offended by anything. (Also, I'm kind of a robot in general.)
I'm also not the type to get offend on somebody else's behalf. So, my position is, What do the targets of these slurs think? If a significant portion want them banned, then let's ban them; if they don't, then let's not. Right now, judging by the admittedly tiny sample of people quoted in Stefan's article, there does not seem to be sufficient outcry among the targets of the slurs to support a ban. It seems like the people with actual cause to be offended prefer to keep the game as it is and to let Scrabble World be a little niche of society in which the derogatory words exist as nothing more than arrays of tiles.
However, if I was playing against somebody who sincerely wanted to keep slurs off their board (which is totally understandable) I would agree to not use them. Maybe that's a workable compromise: Keep the word list as is, but allow either player to declare a slur "opt out" before a match. As long as both players know the valid words in advanced, it's a fair game, and it would hardly be any different than one in which derogatory words are allowed.
Well, that's all for now.
Until next time...
The latest is this article by the inimitable Scrabble ambassador Stefan Fatsis. It's on a really interesting debate -- prompted by the recent protests of systemic racism and police brutality -- about whether or not slurs should be allowed in tournament Scrabble. Currently they are. You won't find them in the Scrabble dictionary, which doesn't contain any "patently offensive" words, but they are on the Official Word List used by competitive players.
The debate is similar to ones we in the crossword puzzle community have had over certain words, but there are some key differences. The first, as Stefan points out in the opening sentence of the article, is that for most competitive Scrabble players the definitions of the words are completely irrelevant. Words are only words until they qualify for inclusion on the list of valid plays. After that they become meaningless strings of characters. There have been top-rated Scrabble players who could not read or write English. In crossword puzzles, definitions (or "clues," if you will) are half the game. Words are always words, and their meanings are very relevant to the solving experience.
The second major difference is that in Crossworld there are already taboo words, ones that aren't even offensive -- ORGASM,* for example, has never appeared in a mainstream puzzle despite having grid-friendly letters -- so eliminating slurs is already a must for crossword puzzle editors (even if they don't always do a good job of it). In Scrabble World, the standard for decades has been: Every word is valid, period. So, exempting slurs would be a significant change of the norm.
*This almost certainly would have been okay in the bygone BuzzFeed, edited by Caleb Madison, but I suspect slurs still would not have been permissible. Once, I pitched an idea to Caleb for a DIRTY/CLEAN Schrödinger puzzle in which theme entries could be either "dirty" (DAMN IT) or "clean" (DARN IT). One of my suggestions was BITCH/WITCH, but he nixed it on the grounds that BITCH is too gendered in its vulgar connotation. He green-lit the idea though. But then the whole puzzle folded like a week later, and I never actually made the puzzle.
So what's the right thing for Scrabble World to do? Eliminate slurs or keep them?
My general position on things like this: Y'all go ahead and figure that out and let me know.
It's kind of a cop out, but more so it's that I don't want to speak out of pocket about derogatory terms that aren't aimed at me. I am not personally offended by slurs -- in crossword puzzles or Scrabble -- but I'm a heterosexual, middle-aged, white man. There aren't even any slurs for me. I mean, theoretically there are (HONKY and HAOLE and whatnot), but practically there aren't, because nobody ever actually uses them in a pejorative way toward me, and I never heard them growing up in my formative years, so they never enrooted in my psyche. I have the luxury of not being offended by anything. (Also, I'm kind of a robot in general.)
I'm also not the type to get offend on somebody else's behalf. So, my position is, What do the targets of these slurs think? If a significant portion want them banned, then let's ban them; if they don't, then let's not. Right now, judging by the admittedly tiny sample of people quoted in Stefan's article, there does not seem to be sufficient outcry among the targets of the slurs to support a ban. It seems like the people with actual cause to be offended prefer to keep the game as it is and to let Scrabble World be a little niche of society in which the derogatory words exist as nothing more than arrays of tiles.
However, if I was playing against somebody who sincerely wanted to keep slurs off their board (which is totally understandable) I would agree to not use them. Maybe that's a workable compromise: Keep the word list as is, but allow either player to declare a slur "opt out" before a match. As long as both players know the valid words in advanced, it's a fair game, and it would hardly be any different than one in which derogatory words are allowed.
Well, that's all for now.
Until next time...
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