On Problematic Scrabble (and Crossword Puzzle) Vocabulary

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...

NYT Spelling Bee: BULLYPIC

I decided to start blogging daily about the New York Times Spelling Bee game -- just for fun.  The entries will be very short.  We will see how long this lasts.  Here's the first one.

Grid:

My genius list:

Real pangram: PUBLICLY

Fake pangram: BULLYPIC

A movie in which bullying plays a prominent role; a few bullypics which come to mind immediately are The Karate Kid and Mean Girls.

Difficulty: Easy

Not more than a week ago I tried to spell PUBLICLY PUBLICALLY and got the squiggly red line, so I was primed for this one.  I got the pangram instantly and hit genius level within a few minutes.  I even kept playing and added a few more, which I normally don't do.

Olio: CLUBBY?  If you say so.  My mind kept wanting to enter BULLY PULPIT even though there is no T and it's two words.

I did... I did...

Who made this perplexing grid?
 Who crossed words sought and hid?
I did, I did!

Who used squares of black and white?
Who kept all their fill so tight?
I did, I did!

Who brought back the OPEL car?
Who made ATTU island a star?
I did, I did!

Who made some puzzles not half bad?
Who made Stamford solvers mad?
I did, I did!

[Sung to the tune of "We do" from "The Simpsons."]

I was profiled this month in Deb Amlen's Who Made My Puzzle? column.

All I have to say about it: I think it's really cool.

Well, that, and I'm not happy about how bald I've gotten over the past decade, as accentuated in the profile illustration above.  But, that's just how it goes.  I either need to break down and get restorative surgery or just accept it and shut the fuck up -- probably the latter.  Inertia is a hell of a law.

42

[My submission had square 42 circled.]

My only regret with this puzzle is that it didn't run on August 28 of this year.  It's a long shot, having a puzzle run randomly on a given date, but it would have been cool for two reasons: 1) August 28, 2019 will be a Wednesday, the one day I need to complete the NYT cycle; 2) It will be my 42nd birthday.  Oh well.  It's always cool to have a puzzle published, no matter what the date.  What's more, guess what number puzzle this is for me in the NYT -- 36.  That's not 42, but it is next to 42 on the multiplication table, so, you know...

I don't have too much to say about this puzzle.  Well, actually I do, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'm telling myself I don't.  It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke:

I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.

My pen is too far away at the moment.  Before I go, however, I'll leave you with a hot take: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is overrated and fantasy is a boring genre in general.

Until next time...

[Despite what I said above, this is one of my favorite shirts.  It's nice fabric -- durable but soft.  Cuts my figure quite nicely, if I do say so myself.]

A few further thoughts after reading some online comments.

I've seen a couple people grouse that THE MEANING OF LIFE is not a technically accurate description of 42 vis-à-vis THGTTG, because in the actual text, Adams writes that 42 is the answer to "the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything."

To that, I say, c'mon people.  It's a distinction without a difference.  42 is very much associated with the phrase THE MEANING OF LIFE.  Google them together.  You get roughly 50 million hits, and all the top ones (I only looked at the first few pages) are references to THGTTG -- articles, message boards threads, YouTube clips, etc.  Here is one of myriad examples using the exact wording in the puzzle:

It's like saying the Night of the Living Dead is not a zombie movie, because the undead monsters are never called "zombies" in the actual film.

I've also seen a couple people grouse about TEHEE.  I'm in agreement that it's not great fill.  I will downgrade it on my word lists and try to avoid it from here on out.  My defense for using it, is that at Merriam-Webster.com it is listed as the primary spelling, with TEE-HEE being the variant.

Lastly, ECOCIDE is totally a thing and a legit word.  I don't get the objection (i.e., Rex Parker's objection) here at all.

Goon With Your Bad Self

I had every intention of writing extended notes about my puzzle in today's New York Times, but I'm just too tired.  I still haven't caught up on my sleep from ACPT to be honest -- speaking of which, you can read my account of the weekend here.

Also, please enjoy this picture of a BEEFCAKE.  35% super-stud, don't forget.

ACPT II: Blur Weekend

My second ACPT weekend came and went in a beat -- it was a whirlwind, a cyclone, an oe.  I worked a lot, socialized some, drank a little, and barely slept.  I was a tournament judge/referee again this year.  Last year I (infamously) had a puzzle in the competition, so I got to be a judge, and that got me on the email list, I guess.  Whatever the case, I jumped at the chance to do it again.  It's a good role for me.  I wouldn't mind competing, but I'm not super into tournament solving.  It's fine.  I'd probably like it more if I was faster, but I'll never be faster, because I'm never going to practice to get faster.  Plus, as a judge you get your room and board comped, and you get to wear a different color ID tag than the competitors, so, yeah, pretty sweet gig.

I carpooled to the tournament Friday afternoon with some members of my DC-area puzzle/trivia crew -- Brian Cross, Michael Berman, and Dan Felsenheld.  I wasn't nearly as anxious this time around since I knew what to expect and since I had already met most the other judges last year.  I was assigned to share a room with New York Times assistant puzzle editor Sam Ezersky.  He was already there when I arrived, and he was incredibly anxious... about college basketball.  Last season his Virginia Cavaliers became the first 1-seed to lose to a 16-seed, and it looked like it was happening again.  UVA was losing at halftime to some school named Gardner-Webb when I arrived.  I'm pretty sure I barged in on Sam during his personal time.  As a sports fan, I know the feeling -- when you want to watch a game alone, because you want to obsess over it without drawing innocent bystanders into your manic orbit.  But Sam was welcoming and cordial, nevertheless, because that's just how he is -- one of the nicest people I've ever met.

I took a lap around the lobby and said "hi" to a few folks, but the festivities weren't in full effect yet, so I went back up to the room to kill some time before the judges' dinner.  UVA had made a second half push and taken a comfortable lead, so Sam was in a calmer state.  He said if they had lost again, he would have skipped the dinner, and I'm not sure if he was joking or not.

After dinner I went to the bar to see who would show up.  I chatted with Ben Zimmer for a few minutes, who I found out on the ride home is a prominent linguist and columnist.  That's the best thing about this tournament -- so many interesting people.  You'll talk to somebody, and when you finish, somebody else will come up and say something like, "You know, that guy invented fantasy baseball?"  This is not a completely contrived example.  Daniel Okrent, the former New York Times editor credited with creating Rotisserie League Baseball, competed in the tournament.  I didn't talk to him though.  I didn't even know he was there until I scored his final puzzle.  That's too bad I would have liked to have taken a picture with him.  I'm not a big pic person, but I have a friend who's really into the Ken Burns Baseball documentaries and the 30 for 30 doc Silly Little Game, both of which feature Okrent heavily, so it would have been fun to send him a pic of us.  Maybe next year.

I noticed quite a few other judges have family members join them and help out too, and it got me wondering if my family would ever want to come with me.  My kids are too young now to serve in any official capacity, and I doubt my wife would ever have much interest in it -- even just hanging out as an observer.  She wouldn't explicitly not have fun, but she's not a puzzle person at all, and she would have no frame of reference for anything.  Basic crossword lingo like "themeless" and "rebus" would be meaningless to her.  I don't think she's ever read a single clue from one of my puzzles -- and I mean that literally.  (I'm totally fine with it, by the way.)  Sometimes if I'm doing a puzzle and she's around, I'll throw out a clue I think she might know (French phrases and African countries are her strong suits), and even if she knows the answer she'll sometimes get it wrong because she doesn't know the crossword puzzle conventions -- verb tenses, abbreviations, question mark clues, etc.  We take these things for granted now, because they're so ingrained in us, but I remember being flummoxed by it all when I first started solving 20 years ago.  I distinctly recall seeing the clue, "1972 Coppola movie, with 'The'", and being like, "with 'The'"?  What the fuck doesn't that mean? 

So, the only way I can imagine my wife ever joining me is if the tournament goes back to NYC or some other major city where she has friends and other activities -- and that's not out of the question.  The tournament is nearing capacity of the Stamford Marriott, and it's probably only going to get bigger.  Will Shortz notably has not announced a date or location for the 2020 tournament yet.  The hotel must know something is up because its manager read a proclamation from the mayor extolling the virtues of ACPT.  Although it's possible that did more harm than good.  The manager made several gaffes during his speech.  He pronounced Erik Agard's last name "uh-guard" and said he was the first "American African" to win at ACPT.  Then he said Will "Short" -- twice.  That's such an oddly specific mistake (silent Z?) that I thought maybe the proclamation had it wrong, but I took a peek at it, and it was correct.  It was pretty bad.  I mean, anybody can make a few verbal miscues, but if you're trying to woo somebody, you should be sure you at least have their name right.  In fact, go ahead and read the whole thing aloud a few times in the mirror before you get up to the podium -- basic public speaking tip.

Anyway...

[This is the only picture I took the entire weekend -- a random shot of the main ballroom prior to Puzzle 4 (I think).]

Friday night I stayed up late hanging out and playing games.  I didn't go back to my room until after 1:30 am.  Partly this is because I was having fun; partly it's because I was scared of having a repeat of last year's sleepless Friday night.  It turned out to be a well-founded fear.  It was a dreadful night once again.  I toss and turned in bed for hours, caught in that hellish circle, in which you can't sleep because you can't calm down, but you can't calm down, because you're not yet sleeping.  My mind and emotions go to uncomfortable places when this happens.  It's the worst thing in my life that occurs on a regular (if infrequent) basis.  I don't know if such episodes are best described as mini freak-outs or full-blown panic attacks, or if there's any distinction to be drawn at 5:30 am.  I start wondering what will happen if I literally don't sleep at all.  Can I just get up and start my day?  Do people do that?  Will I be able to think coherent thoughts and form coherent sentences?  Will I collapse from exhaustion by lunchtime?  Thankfully, I've never gotten the answer because at some point I jolt awake, which means I slept, perhaps only for a short time, but I slept, and that's enough.  It's over.  I'm good.  Tired, but good.

On Saturday, I made a great decision: I volunteered to be the puzzle runner between the judge's room, where the scoring is done, and the tech room, where the results are update online.  Instead of sitting all day in a room hunched over a stack of puzzles with a highlighter in my hand, I only did that for part of the day.  The rest of the time I walked a 100-foot hallway over and over again.  It got a little tedious, and I was running on fumes, but I got in 21,000 steps according to the app on my phone.

As the first wave of puzzles came in, I got wind that Mr. Agard had filled in a square incorrectly.  "Well, he's out of the finals then," I announced to whomever happened to be near me.  I was perhaps a bit too dismissive of his chances -- he impressively climbed back into fourth place prior to the penultimate puzzle on Sunday -- but ultimately I was correct.  He couldn't quite overtake David Plotkin for third place.  It's a shame.  No disrespect to Mr. Plotkin, but I want to see the three best solvers in the finals, and Erik is one of the three best solvers.  He and Dan Feyer are 1A and 1B, in my opinion (and then there's like a five-way tie for third).  Erik is unquestionably the fastest solver in Crossword, but perhaps he's a bit reckless.  Dan has an unparalleled combination of speed and accuracy.

And that's why Mr. Feyer is now an eight-time (!) champion.  On Sunday*, I watched him win it again -- pretty handily.  The finals itself wasn't too exciting.  Dan, finishing the "regular season" with the high score, got a few seconds head start and only increased his lead as he solved.  Joon Pahk came in second and Plotkin third.  Even though there wasn't much drama, I was happy to see Dan win.  He told me last year that he likes this blog, and I've been a fan of his ever since.  That's how vain I am.  I pull for anybody who gives me a compliment.

*I slept decently Saturday night, if you were wondering.

Also, the B Division provided plenty of drama.  The finals was relatively close with Brian Fodera edging out Matthew Gritzmacher on the big boards, but the real story came after everybody had gone home.  Apparently, Brian noticed his score on the last puzzle before the finals was impossibly high, and he laudably reported it as such.  A scoring error was confirmed and a correction was made. However, after the adjustment, Brian fell to fourth place in the B Division, meaning he should not have even qualified for the finals.  According to the ACPT website, the B Division playoff has been "nullified."  I don't know if this means there is no winner this year, or if Matthew is declared the winner for finishing with the highest score pre-finals.  And the prize money has already been awarded, so I'm not sure how it's all playing out.

I can, however, say this about the error: It wasn't me.  It sounds like it wasn't anybody.  As I understand it, the program that scans the puzzles mistook a write-over in Brian's puzzle for a black square, changing the word count of the puzzle, inflating his score (each correct answer is worth points).  The judges take painstaking care to ensure the grids of the top competitors are marked totally correctly.  But the computation is left to the computer program, and that's what made the mistake.  It's like if you put a bunch of correct data into a spreadsheet, and set up all your formulas correctly, and still get the wrong answer because there's a bug in the program.

With all the said, it's still unfortunate and embarrassing, and there are things that can be done to safeguard against it in the future.  For one thing, the computer program should probably be strengthened to try to catch outliers.  I won't speak to that any further since I don't know anything about how it's coded.  On the human side, we judges should probably perform "sanity checks" on the scores (not just the grids) of each of the top competitors.  Had we done that, we might have caught the error.  But this is all post-hoc analysis.  The next big error will be something else entirely -- and there will be another big error someday, because you can't foresee every potential problem.  Humans are fallible, and so are the machines on which we rely.  Shit happens.

Well, that was my blur of an ACTP weekend.  Until next time...

On Problematic Crossword Puzzle Vocabulary

A crossword puzzle of mine is running in today's New York Times.  It's a Triple-F puzzle -- Fine Friday Fare -- a solid themeless I suspect most people will enjoy and then forget about by the end of the day.  And that's okay by me.

The clues on some of the longer marquee answers were more straightforward than I would prefer.  My submitted clue for PUT PEN TO PAPER, for example, was "Start a book, say," which I thought was a clever redirect, as it makes the average solver think of reading before writing, but it was edited to reference writing explicitly. (Similarly, my clue for SPLITSVILLE was "A house divided?")  But this is merely a quibble, and the edits are not necessarily "wrong."  Solvers often times prefer something more straightforward, as otherwise the clues can come off as gimmicky or too clever by half.

Anyway, what I really want to talk about in this post is the entry at 5-Across: LAMEST.  I'm anticipating some criticism for this one (indeed, I got some), because the word lame, meaning inferior, is offensive to some people.  It's ableist language, implying there is something inherently bad about people who can't walk.

First, let me say upfront, this was my clue, verbatim.  It wasn't edited.  I didn't know that lame was a problematic word in certain communities.  I just learned this a few months ago.  Had I known, I would have submitted a different clue.  ("Most hobbled" seems better to me.  It's an awkward superlative, to be sure, but there is no connoted judgement.)

Lame is a word I've used and heard all my life without even thinking about its etymology.  I had never even made the connection between lame-meaning-inferior and lame-meaning-disabled.  To me, they were strictly homonyms.  It's like anemic, meaning lacking force, and anemic, meaning pertaining to the condition of anemia.  The words look and sound the same, and if you stop to think about it, you know they have the same root, but they occupy different areas in the brain.  If I read the sentence, "The Mariners offense has been anemic over the last month," I'm not thinking about hemoglobin deficiency, and I certainly don't think of it as a slight to people who have anemia.  It's just a word that means weak.

In a similar way, I thought lame was just a word that means inferior.  Even after learning that some people found it offensive, I was still not totally convinced that there was anything wrong with it.  It seemed like people trying to make something offensive that isn't offensive.  I mean, I certainly was not alone in my lame-ignorance -- I suspect even today, most people don't know it's offensive.  So, if that's the case, why not just let that be?  If almost everybody thinks two things are totally separate, then they are totally separate, and if they are totally separate then nobody need be offended.  Isn't that the better way to go?

But, upon further reflection, I disabused myself of this notion, for a two main reasons: 1) the word gay; 2) what's it to me?  On 1), it's a bit weird, and more than a bit embarrassing, to think about now, since I'm a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights, but I used to use the word gay to mean bad frequently.  It was part of my everyday vocabulary as a teenager.  I was even using it my first semester in college, and I was resistant to change under the same rationale laid out above: It's just a word that means bad; it has nothing to do with a person's sexual preference.  Thankfully, I had some patient gay friends who helped me realize what an awful argument this is, and I completely eliminated that usage from my vocabulary.  Today, over two decades later, it seems utterly ridiculous to claim that gay doesn't actually mean gay.  The parallel with lame is obvious.

On 2), even if I didn't understand why lame-qua-inferior is problematic, I don't need to.  I just need to know there is a group of the population -- rational human beings -- who find it offensive.  That should be enough to not use it.  If it's not, then I'm just being a dick.  There are nearly 200,000 words in the English language; there are dozens of synonyms for inferior; and there is a non-offensive way to clue the entry LAME (and its derivative forms) in crossword puzzles.  Why push back on this?  What's it to me?

What's it to me?  Wouldn't we all be better off if people stopped to ask this of themselves more frequently?  Yes, yes, we would.

Well, I think I've said all I have to say on this topic.  I was planning on writing another part in this post about the usage of potentially offensive language in crossword puzzles, in general (see the discussion around 25-Down in this puzzle).  But, I don't have the time or energy to tackle that one at the moment, and, if you made it this far, you've probably had your fill of me, anyway.

Until next time...

PS -- I noticed that the entry ARE YOU BLIND has an ableist tinge to it as well.  Is that an offensive statement?  I don't think so, but if Stevie Wonder wants to tell me otherwise, I will listen.

PPS -- Months after posting the above commentary, I came across this article using lame to mean weak or unconvincing: “Hateful” and “awful” may seem a bit harsh for what reads like a lame attempt at cheekiness.  The interesting thing about this is that it's an article specifically calling out the New York Times for using offensively clueless entries in its crossword puzzle!  To be honest, I've gone back and forth and back again several times on lame since first posting this.  My slightly revised position is that I probably won't use lame in a generally pejorative sense, but I don't get offended by it, and I'm not going to proselytize against it.