"I firmly believe in not exposing people to offensive words, especially racial, gendered or sexual slurs."

"Any offensive words that appeared in ‘Typeshift’ puzzles were there in error, and when I was informed of them I updated the block list and generated new puzzles." 

Said Zack Gage, the 36-year-old developer of the word game “Typeshift," who had a licensing agreement with Merriam-Webster, quoted in "Merriam-Webster promoted a word game littered with offensive terms — the latest reckoning over language in the puzzle world/From Scrabble tournaments to the New York Times crossword, word games grapple with new standards for what is considered derogatory" (WaPo).

Typeshift is a game like the NYT "Spelling Bee," where you're given a bunch of letters and you have to find words. The games could avoid offering letters that even permit the spelling of some very offensive words or, more simply, refuse to accept certain words even though you're seeing the letters that would spell them. Just by chance, today's NYT "Spelling Bee" serves up the letters to write what is conventionally considered (by Americans) to be the dirtiest English word and it's also a misogynistic slur:

The game won't accept that word, but the letters are still foisting it upon the game-players. We have to see it in our mind! The NYT is letting that happen, even though it goes pretty far in excluding words that appear in the letters. As I've blogged about in an old post, it doesn't accept "nappy." I do think the NYT would avoid offering a set of letters that could be used to spell the "n-word," but other than that, its mechanism for preserving good feeling is to reject the word when we think of it. 

But back to Typeshift. Is it really "littered with offensive terms"? The article begins with an anecdote about a woman who is upset to see the word "lynched." That's not an offensive word, but a standard word, like "murder" or "rape," that refers to something ugly. You might not want your word games to include anything unpleasant. You're playing the game to relax or to sharpen your mind and you don't want to be distracted by thinking about anything with negative substance. 

Typeshift was operating off of the Merriam-Webster dictionary and only excluding words it designated "offensive," so Typeshift wasn't "littered" with any words words in that category. Obviously, "lynched" wouldn't have that designation. It's a word that should be used in standard writing. It's not an offensive word, but a disturbing idea. Don't mix the 2 things up. It's fine to argue that a lightly amusing game should not prompt us to think about anything negative — take out "death" and "cancer," etc. — but don't call words that denote negative things "offensive terms." 

That confusion is dangerous — once you get away from the topic of games. To make "lynching" an offensive word is to make it hard to talk about the subject seriously. Now, you've squarely arrived in "1984":

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?"