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?"
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I recently gave up on Spelling Bee because over and over I'd come up with a word - that I could find in the American Oxford dictionary - but was not on their list. Two I recall are "anent" and "exudate". Sort of weird, but definitely off-putting.
It's been fascinating to watch the policing of language. I understand it's not really about sensitivity and respect, but about power. What truly befuddled me is that ordinary Americans with a long history of liberty have so passively submitted to being dominated.
Cunt isn't offensive or negative. It's just naughty. For a person (in US usage) it's a woman who's interested in woman things even at the expense of the general welfare. Nevertheless she has her upsides. British usage is that it's any unpleasant or unreliable person, man or woman. The upside is omitted.
The dictionary makers are thinking up words that ought to be offensive, not that are offensive.
Very often they're the perfect word. That's how they got there.
I quit reading the New York Times in 1992 when Eugene T. Maleska left the crossword desk.
There's King Cnut who commanded the waves to recede. You don't want to trigger anyone.
Your post took away my obvious comment that, in the quest to 'manage' words and language, we're racing ahead to Orwell's vision of 1984. Once you play games with the language, it does not stop. It's not a slippery slope. It's a plunge. It just keeps evolving, sucking in new words and spitting out their new meanings. Or simply shredding them entirely, making them unavailable for use in public until people get used to never using those words again at all.
And the clever thing about this is that those making the changes in language are like kids playing a game and changing the rules as they go, making sure to keep everyone else off balance and unsure, making it a game no one can actually win. And as long as you're the one making the rules, you can stay on safe ground and everyone else has to be very careful, or they are dismissed- scrubbed from society. Regarded as 'not acceptable'.
There is a long history on both the left and the right with abusing language for the sake of a 'cause'. One would think that if a cause is not strong enough to handle a word, then it's not really strong enough to stand on it's own merits, is it? It has no philosophical base from which to cast it's demands and should be laughed out of civil society.
Or, to use a line from the old movie "WarGames", The only way to win the game is to not play.
Merriam-Webster promoted a dictionary littered with offensive terms.
The progressive, forward-looking puritans who run the Scrabble tournaments banned Papist rednecks named Nancy, much to everyone's relief, but the only way to completely protect the peasantry from themselves and each other would be the creation of New dictionaries limiting the words one is allowed to Speak, thus limiting the ideas that one is allowed to think.
"don't call words that denote negative things "offensive terms.""
A nice liberal sentiment. But the point is to use offense to police the culture.
"That confusion is dangerous — once you get away from the topic of games."
A nice liberal sentiment. But the real danger is to allow deplorables to express deplorable thoughts.
"To make "lynching" an offensive word is to make it hard to talk about the subject seriously. Now, you've squarely arrived in "1984""
The point is to talk about subjects not seriously but correctly. To lefties, 1984 is a utopian how-to manual.
I usually try typing those words in anyway, always mildly disappointed when it doesn't accept them. Today, though, I was most miffed about "uncited" being left off the list.
The idea of using custom dictionaries, if that's the right way to describe them, seems fraught with problems. These are games for philologists, and when you leave off things like "croft" because they're, what, old-timey?, or judicata because it's "foreign" (no problem with halal, though!), it feels insulting. What a bunch of pussies. Or maybe I'm just a bit pissy. Whatever, they don't want me to say (or think?) either of those things.
In the 80s, when text to speech was novel, a Votrax used to announce to the common room who a phone call was for. Also you could output text to the thing and listen to its robot voice rendition (echo something > /dev/something). Prudes, anticipating trouble from the nearly all male workforce, devised a stop list of offensive words it wouldn't pronounce.
The stop list was a gold mine for other uses.
I heart this as a kid. Little Johnny is in a class discussing prose and poetry. The teacher asks him to give an example of either. Johnny says
Mary had a little lamb
It was a little runt
It put its nose beneath her dress
And shoved it up her
What do you want, teacher, prose or poetry?
Prose please
And shoved it up her asshole.
You can rhymed into offending yourself.
The real problem with all this newspeak is that language controls thought. We think in concepts that are represented by words, and if you control the words then you control the thoughts that are permitted. Look at this game. It is a GAME, and NOBODY but the person playing is seeing those oh so offensive words. So the effort to control those words is exactly an effort to control allowed thoughts. And the fools have no idea where the endgame for this may wind up. I fear for our country...and the world.
Those responsible for the NYT "Spelling Bee" word game must loose sleep at night worrying whether or not they've identified and excluded all the naughty words one might form from the offered letters. Talk about stress...
Of course such word editing only applies to the white world. Can’t edit the words in rap songs or that would be racist. These types of discussions are like counting the number of angels on a pin head - interesting to the number of people who can fit on a pin head.
Also, anyone other than children who needs to be protected from certain words has a weak mind. We should be more concerned about people with weak minds who are too easily influenced than about words themselves. Can we have a safe society filled with people with weak minds?
It's a long time since I've read 1984, but I believe in the same conversation it is said that once offensive and unnecessary words are eliminated, no one will be able to oppose the existing authority. You could say "Big Brother is ungood," but there would be no terms in the language to defend that proposition. This is where the ultra-Progressives would take us. Orwell was a Socialist, but his prescience regarding the inherent dangers was astonishing.
But in this stupid postmodern world, the word is the idea. And simultaneously is not the idea, depending on who says it.
Whatever happened to, "Sticks and stones ... "?
It is equally offensive to point out the pretzel-twist paths of thought that lead to behaviors like those described in this post. That mode of attempting to avoid being racist, too, has been deemed an offensive systemic racist behavior, though unavoidable based on the offense taken by race hucksters at the use of the words themselves. In other words, heads you're racist, tails you're racist, and flipping the coin was also racist.
The only way to not lose is to not play the "what is racist" game under the rules provided by those promoting the idea of infinite racism everywhere, forever, without end. Amen.
From context, I know the "nappy" meant must be the adjective describing Black peoples' hair, but my first thought is still the noun "nappy" that is a baby's diaper.
[Insert comment about co-eds at University of North Texas.]
Dune...
Tune...
Cute...
Duet...
Nude...
Wait Nude? What are they talking about...
Oh...
The alphabet is misogynistic. Abolish it!
Are there hidden object picture puzzles with genitalia, find the pussy? Make offense difficult to engage. There would be various degrees of difficulty for different ages. The Sunday NYT puzzle would be the top.
The saying “if you spot it you got it” may not have been coined in AA, but I heard it at AA meetings up north all the time.
Down here they don’t bestride? too heavily on the one liners.
Hilarious. These geniuses expect to swaddle themselves and their clientele in a Safe Space where never is heard a discouraging word; where the unicorns graze peacefully on the pastures of sugar treats; and every puzzle-contestant wins a shiny prize.
What is a 5-letter synonym for “idiot”? Starts with “m” and ends with “n” and has two “o’s”?
Will the version of Mortal Combat where avatars slay each other with offensive words be coming out this Christmas?
This reminds me of the old lady who called the police to complain that her neighbor was whistling dirty songs.
In his novel 'The Humanoids,' Jack Williamson posited a race of androids so dedicated to preventing humans from coming to harm that they forbade any possibly-dangerous activities. For instance, it became forbidden to build furniture or woodwork as a hobby, as you might get a splinter or stick a finger into a bandsaw. Instead, humans were allowed to work with and build from blocks of soft plastic.
This is just the same thing, but with words.
You would think the coinage of offensive words were to make them as short as possible so as to make them easy to memorize. Perhaps we are missing the true unexpected value of short offensive words. They can't be used in hi-minded NYT word puzzle games.
"Who are those guys?" - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
What is a 5-letter synonym for “idiot”? Starts with “m” and ends with “n” and has two “o’s”?
Joe Biden's picture is in the dictionary to illustrate the definition of that word.
I never knew "dunce" was the dirtiest English word and a misogynistic slur. I sure do garner a lot of knowledge from this blog! Thanks!
I don't like playing 'word games,' either in life or as actual games, but it seems that the maker of the puzzle could put the letters into a computer, run a program, and get a list of every possible word according to some dictionary or database.
Then those words could be compared against a list of 'offensive' words, and letter could be substituted accordingly.
This is not difficult to do.
However, I am a free speech absolutist, so I say people just need to get over themselves.
Btw, the C-word (I'll respect you wishes on your blog) is used like we use the word 'jerk' or 'asshole.' It's not that big of a deal in Great Britain. 'Twat' is the same...kind of commonplace and benign.
"I firmly believe in not exposing people to offensive words, especially racial, gendered or sexual slurs."
As a language person (I've worked in some form of publishing for most of the last 25 years), I'm disgusted by supposed language people who say things like this. How can anyone who cares about the expression of ideas embrace the idea that vocabularies should be purged of words (which is a prelude for purging ideas) that might make people uncomfortable?
It's 2+2=5 for liberal arts majors.
C*** isn't offensive or negative. It's just naughty. For a person (in US usage) it's a woman who's interested in woman things even at the expense of the general welfare.
What about the word "obtuse"? Is that offensive?
Or are obtuse people too obtuse to realize that they are obtuse? And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are not simply assholes.
It won't let you spell Hillary?
What is a 5-letter synonym for “idiot”? Starts with “m” and ends with “n” and has two “o’s”?
That word has six letters.
I'm surprised "gender fluid" hasn't been misinterpreted, Bartholin's glands etc.
How can anyone who cares about the expression of ideas embrace the idea that vocabularies should be purged of words (which is a prelude for purging ideas) that might make people uncomfortable?
What makes the Woke zealots uncomfortable is their inability to muster a cogent counter argument when their "ideas" are challenged. They can only win arguments when the language is purged of the ability to challenge them.
I guess at the heart it's a question of game design.
Technically, Scrabble has an official limited dictionary that includes all the words you're allowed to play. There's no law that your house rules have to use the same dictionary, but at least as far as they're concerned, no naughty words are allowed.
Here it's a question of what puzzles are allowed. Gage generates the puzzles, and it's a fairly trivial exercise in dynamic programming to check which words can be formed from which puzzles.
I really can't see getting worked up about a naughty word appearing in a letter puzzle -- words are made out of letters! Film at 11! -- but strictly as a consumer product, I can see not wanting to use any words that wouldn't appear in the newspaper itself.
It's not a free speech issue, because the words have no expressive meaning. It's just a letter game.
It's interesting how the concept of inappropriate words has changed. George Carlin had that bit about the seven words that you can't say on television. That list has greatly expanded to cover slurs and words that make people uncomfortable. A few years ago, they did that live version of All in the Family on TV and they had to edit the original 1960s script to remove some words that would make people uncomfortable today. As to seeing dirty words in puzzles...I think that says more about the person who took offense than the person who created the puzzle. It took me a while to see that word in the puzzle because I'm not the kind of person who would ever think to use it. "Harsh language or abuse, I never, never use, whatever the emergency. Though, bother it, I may occasionally say, I never use the big, big D."
"Censorship is telling a man he can't eat steak because a baby can't chew it." Twain.
I don't play those wordgames--the wordgames we play here, spontaneously, are better than whatever the young noobs at the NYT come up with.
As for "cunt," to my knowledge it's an ancient Anglo-Saxonism, simply their word for what the Romans called a vagina.
Anyway, being offended is a choice, as much as deliberately giving offense.
I recently gave up on Spelling Bee because over and over I'd come up with a word - that I could find in the American Oxford dictionary - but was not on their list.
I used a cheating website to come up with 44 words for the puzzle in the OP, and it didn't accept over half of those words (tho some of those, like dictu and nuit, might not be considered English words).
It didn't like any of the words in the first column:
uncited induce induct
uniced
dunite united untied
dictu
ducti dunce
educt
centu
cunei
cunit cutie
cutin
incut tunic
indue nudie
tendu tuned unite untie cued
duce
duci duct
cuit
cunt cute
unce
unci duet
duit dune
dunt nude
tund
unde
etui
nuit tune unit
Dirtiest American English word, Brits use it with reckless abandon
e.g. it is claimed to be offensive to say there are two sides to THE HOLOCAUST : but then of course which side benefits ?
since there was the side that thought it good and acted thusly and the other side suffered from these actions
Critter said...
Of course such word editing only applies to the white world. Can’t edit the words in rap songs or that would be racist. These types of discussions are like counting the number of angels on a pin head - interesting to the number of people who can fit on a pin head.
Also, anyone other than children who needs to be protected from certain words has a weak mind. We should be more concerned about people with weak minds who are too easily influenced than about words themselves. Can we have a safe society filled with people with weak minds?
-----------
applying such wisdom to Trump (white man) mean tweets what do we see about society today?
Somewhat OT (but bear with me!), an article in the NYT Op-Ed section today discusses two bills addressing sex trafficking, and plumps for the one that decriminalizes not just the sex workers, but their "clients" and "managers" as well. Um, lady (she's a transwoman, so I'm not sure that's the right word), the words you want are "johns" and "pimps."
Which brings me to the link-up: Suppose a Spelling Bee with the letters P, E, B, M, O, L, I. Anyone think they'd pass "pimpmobile" as a pangram? I thought not.
Spelling Bee(s) in any form are racist.
"shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits"
"Whatever happened to, "Sticks and stones ... "?"
Too fucking patriarchal.
That which is offensive is subjective by definition.
And it isn't a destination if you are already there.
So is "OK" offensive when it's spelled out?
Or is that only when it's a hand signal? I guess the deaf will need to find a new sign for that.
you don't want to be distracted by thinking of anything with negative substance
But all I did was ask how to get to Bagel Street!
Robert Frost put cunt into a poem title
@Lyle I was enraged at EXUDATE as well. Also, today, no UNINDICTED!?!?!? C'mon.
RNB said...
In his novel 'The Humanoids,' Jack Williamson
That started with the story "With Folded Hands", yes?
it's one of the most vicious tyrannies out there, and it's what the Left is trying to impose on the rest of us
"That word has six letters."
Count again.
Lol, just found "fellate" in this morning's Bee. The prudes just can't keep up.
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