If we take "obliterate" literally, it means to cause to disappear.

The media seem to be overeager to undercut Trump's accomplishment by saying that he said the word "obliteration" but there's actually — possibly — something left. 

From this morning's news: "Trump reveals Israel sent agents to Iran’s bombed nuclear sites to confirm their 'total obliteration.'"

He seems determined not to abandon his word of choice, "obliteration."

How literally do we take "obliteration"? Really hardcore literalism would require that the thing be wiped from human memory. "Ob-" means against and "littera" means letter. Strike out the text. It's what Orwell's "memory hole" did. 

So how have we been using the word "obliterate" in recent years? Here's what I've noticed in the past 2 decades, just 11 examples taken from this blog's archive.

1. Quoting Hillary Clinton: "If [Obama] does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?"

2. Quoting Camille Paglia: "Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media...."

3. Quoting Trump: "As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)."

"Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would 'peg his IQ as between 100 and 110'..."

"... and claimed that there was 'zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.' The economics commentator Noah Smith estimated Musk’s IQ at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score. A circulating screenshot shows Fox News has pegged the number at 155, citing Sociosite, a junk website. The pollster Nate Silver guessed that Musk is 'probably even a "genius,"' and theorized that he may not always appear that way because... 'high IQs serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.'... To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim. Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into 'low IQ individuals' (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and 'high IQ individuals' (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son)... Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking 'super high-IQ' applicants.... This whole elite intelligence-measuring contest sets the stage for the 'high IQ' tech leader to seize ownership over the concept of intelligence itself — and to ultimately bring all people under its control. As Musk recently posted on X, the platform that he owns: 'It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.'"

Writes Amanda Hess, in "What Is Elon Musk’s IQ? The questionable measure of intelligence has now been uncoupled from any test and loosed into the discourse to justify Silicon Valley’s power" (NYT).

I hate to think I'm inclined to ask Grok: What did Elon Musk mean by "It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence"? And: What does it say about my IQ that I had to ask?

I didn't know the term "bootloader." Reminds me of "bootlicker." And I'm distracted by the (irrelevant) image of a boot... but "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

"He’s still not a populist nationalist, he’s a globalist. He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "The Populist vs. the Billionaire: Bannon, Musk and the Battle Within MAGA/President Trump has made clear he wants to keep both men and their allies within his movement, but the tensions are growing" (NYT).

Mr. Bannon vigorously disagrees with Mr. Musk’s support for H-1B visas, which allow high-skilled individuals to work in America. Mr. Bannon has also warned that billionaires like Mr. Musk and other tech executives — many of whom supported Democrats before backing Mr. Trump — will abandon the MAGA movement.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Is this a mixed metaphor: 'He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable'?" And: "I think a good writer would see the concrete images behind these words and keep things coordinated. I believe George Orwell — 'Politics and the English Language' — supports my position."

But Bannon wasn't writing. He was speaking. 

"Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday night handed the Trump administration a victory for now..."

"... in saying that the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department did not need to immediately pay for more than $1.5 billion in already completed aid work. A federal judge had set a midnight deadline for the agencies to release funds for the foreign aid work.... The Trump administration [made] an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court just hours before the deadline.... Chief Justice Roberts issued an 'administrative stay,' an interim measure meant to preserve the status quo while the justices consider the matter in a more deliberate fashion.... However tentative, the stay was nonetheless the first victory for the administration in a deluge of cases that the justices could hear over President Trump’s blitz of executive actions...."

The NYT reports.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Do you think this is a mixed metaphor: "a deluge of cases about a blitz of executive actions"? And: Would George Orwell have a problem with this dead metaphor?

Anyway, Trump's victory in the Supreme Court isn't much... just preserving the status quo (as Trump disrupts the status quo), but it may feel awfully auspicious.

"I'm looking for famous quotes that express the idea that the person who controls X controls Y."

That's how I prompted Grok just now. I was inspired by something Kakistocracy wrote in the comments in last night's café:

It’s weird to think that Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter.* To be fair -- what he paid for twitter was kinda the down payment for the presidency. It was a package deal. He needed both.

Here are the quotes Grok fished up for me: 

• "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." This quote from George Orwell's "1984" emphasizes how control over information (history) leads to control over future outcomes.

• "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, this quote suggests that control over a nation's monetary system equates to control over its governance.

• "He who controls the media, controls the mind." This is a variation on a quote by Jim Morrison, highlighting how control over information dissemination (media) can shape public perception and behavior.

• "Control the money, you control countries. Control the food, you control the world." A quote often attributed to Henry Kissinger illustrates the power of controlling essential resources like finance and food to influence global or national control.

I'd like to have those 4 over to dinner at the same time. We could talk about controlling things. Who would control the conversation, hmmm? I say Orwell. 

Anyway, Grok and I — at my prompting — proceeded to talk about the ancient Archimedes quote "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." (It's different from those other 4 quotes, but not completely different.) And then I fed Kakistocracy's quote to Grok thusly: 

Via Elon Musk this morning, a George Orwell clip.

Musk writes only, "Orwell nail [sic] it."

Orwell nail it
pic.twitter.com/qMvBpBQrtl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2024

I'm sure many people will watch that and assume it's George Orwell, but it is the actor Chris Langham playing the part of George Orwell, in "George Orwell: A Life in Pictures," 2003 BBC docudrama.

Here's a Wikipedia article about, which says, "No surviving sound recordings or video of the real George Orwell have been found." That made me sad, but Langham's portrayal is brilliant, with no actual recordings of Orwell, no one can be distracted by any inaccuracy. 

And lucky us: The entire 90 minute documentary is on YouTube:

Why is Trump suddenly calling Kamala "Kamabla"?

I had to look it up and found "Donald Trump Launches Two New Nicknames for Kamala Harris in 24 Hours" (Newsweek).

In a string of Monday evening posts on Truth Social, Trump intentionally misspelled the vice president's first name as "Kamabla" after a series of posts earlier in the day calling her "Kamala Crash" and accusing her of bringing about the "Great Depression of 2024."... Trump used the "Kamabla" nickname in a variety of contexts across four posts on Monday, first in relation to food prices, writing: "food is now at an all time high because of Kamabla/Biden INCOMPETENCE."He then used it in the context of debate scheduling "Kamabla Harris is afraid to Debate me on FoxNews," before using it too attack her record: "Kamabla is the WORST V.P." He also used it in a description of what he said were Harris' views on policing and fracking: "Kamabla has stated, over and over again, that she wants to DEFUND THE POLICE AND, WITHOUT QUESTION, BAN FRACKING. "NO MORE FOSSIL FUEL."

I still don't get it why he's saying "Kamabla." Is he being silly/nonsensical?

I asked Meade and he had an immediate guess that sounded good to me: "Kama-blah, like blah blah blah." If that's right, it's a reference to her much-mocked speech patterns.

Trump tries out different nicknames for people. I doubt if this one will last. He has a trial and error approach to nicknames. This one did get Newsweek to repeat a whole series of Truth Social mutterings (and yellings). So it's at least that successful. As for "Kamala Crash," that won't last if the stock market picks up, so I hope it fails.

ADDED: "Blah" can also mean boring and bland. Did you know that "blah" was a noun before it was an adjective? First recorded in 1918, it meant "Meaningless, insincere, or pretentious talk or writing; nonsense, bunkum." I'm quoting the OED, which has these historical examples:

"Do you think that someone who is a drug addict is absolutely incapable of -- that all people who are drug addicts are absolutely incapable of refraining from using drugs?..."

"All right. Then compare that with a person who absolutely has no place to sleep in a particular jurisdiction. Does that person have any alternative other than sleeping outside?... They have... none. They have absolutely none. There's not a single place where they can sleep.... So the point is that the connection between drug addiction and drug usage is more tenuous than the connection between absolute homelessness and sleeping outside."

Said Justice Alito, in yesterday's oral argument in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. There's a precedent, Robinson v. California, that found it to be cruel and unusual punishment to make a crime of the "status" of drug addiction. The 9th Circuit said that the city — by prohibiting sleeping outdoors — had made a crime out of the status of homelessness.

For more detail, see the SCOTUSblog coverage: "Court divided over constitutionality of criminal penalties for homelessness."

George Orwell wrote of "two great facts about women": "One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality."

 A passage from a notebook, quoted in "George Orwell gets his comeuppance in a new book about his first wife/Anna Funder’s ‘Wifedom’ focuses on Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, beginning with her influence on the creation of 'Animal Farm'" (WaPo). The article is by Francine Prose.

“Wifedom” is part biography and part speculative fiction written in the present tense; it includes passages of dialogue and accounts of private thoughts and intimate moments that only the people involved could have recorded or witnessed. (“The sex is strange. Perfunctory. Or performative. It doesn’t seem to be an act of communication at all, or of passion.”)...

"The Court holds that the First Amendment bars Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees."

SCOTUSblog announces.

Here's the opinion.

It's a 6-3, conservative/liberal split. Gorsuch writes. No concurring opinions. One dissenting opinion, by Sotomayor.

From the Gorsuch opinion for the majority:

Like many States, Colorado has a law forbidding businesses from engaging in discrimination when they sell goods and services to the public. Laws along these lines have done much to secure the civil rights of all Americans. But in this particular case Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms. It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe. The question we face is whether that course violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

The business in question is a website design firm (owned by Lorie Smith) that offers customized "text, graphic arts, and videos to 'celebrate' and 'conve[y]' the 'details' of [a wedding couple's] 'unique love story.'"

"I’d have loved it if I were 17. The author goes all in on Bourdain’s angst, his instinctive distrust of authority, his hero-worship of talented outsiders like..."

"... Hunter S. Thompson and Iggy Pop and William S. Burroughs. The older me, the one who prefers wine to fizz, wishes [the author] had more to say about things like: a) the elite and vernacular food worlds pre- and post-Bourdain; b) how Bourdain walked a moral tightrope across the conventions of travel writing and reporting, no mean feat for a wealthy white man in skinny jeans; and c) the sense that he was at the vanguard, more so than even the most scrutinized actors, of a new type of American masculinity. Here was an outdoor, rather than an indoor, cat... "

Writes Dwight Garner in "Anthony Bourdain’s New Biography: Light on Subtlety, Heavy on Grit 'Down and Out in Paradise,' by Charles Leerhsen, is an unvarnished account of a turbulent life" (NYT). 

Garner walks a moral tightrope reviewing a book that is not the book that he would like to read. To what extent is a reviewer obliged stick to whether an author did a good job of what he decided to do?

There's also this: "Bourdain grew into his looks; his was the kind of face that inspired Talmudic levels of study among women." And: "We learn he Googled the name Asia Argento — the Italian actress with whom he had a torrid, messy affair — several hundred times in the last three days of his life, after she rattled him by appearing in public with another man. Their text messages are printed in the book. 'You were reckless with my heart,' Bourdain wrote, before he hanged himself." 

Rattled. Indeed. It sounds as though he had become an obsessive stalker.

By the way, I like the book title — "Down and Out in Paradise" — if it is a play — it must be — on the Orwell title "Down and Out in Paris and London."

"He had been a high school dropout whose early higher education consisted of correspondence courses, and when he took his first teaching job.... His entree into the world of Orwell..."

"... was similarly implausible. He demonstrated his ability to accurately transcribe a barely-legible original manuscript of Orwell’s dystopian novel '1984' by disporting his skills in paleography, the study of ancient and antiquated writing systems. Earlier in his career he deciphered Elizabethan manuscripts.... As a result of his dogged research, publishers had to withdraw incomplete, incorrect or obsolete earlier editions of Orwell’s works. In 'Animal Farm,' Orwell... had originally written that pigeons bombarded Mr. Jones and his men with their 'dung' when they attacked the farm, but the text was amended to say more gracefully that the pigeons 'muted on them.'"

 From "Peter Davison, Orwell Scholar on a Monumental Scale, Dies at 95/A 'super scholarly sleuth,' he devoted 35 years to editing 30 volumes of the author’s books, essays, letters, diaries and manuscripts" (NYT).

Muted on them? I checked the OED, and was delighted to find the bird-specific verb "mute":

It is as if "Animal Farm" had never been written.

How many stories about politics have been told through non-human animal characters?

I want freedom of speech and abhor the prosecution described here, but the Editorial Board of The Washington Post is writing in a ludicrously ignorant style (and this is no context for intentional humor):

What is so frightening and subversive about a children’s book series featuring a flock of sheep? That is a question for Hong Kong authorities, who on Wednesday convicted the books’ creators on charges of sedition....

The picture books in question, written for children aged 4 to 7, depict sheep trying to protect their village from a pack of wolves. The series contained indirect references to social issues.... Even this implied criticism was too much for prosecutors, who claimed the books “indoctrinated” readers and disseminated “separatist” ideas.....

If there were any questions remaining about how far authorities will go to silence dissent, Wednesday’s conviction offers an ominous clue: Not even illustrated children’s books are safe.

Not even? I would think the literature given to children would be the first thing you would want to control. (It's something we fight about in America.) And if turning the characters into non-human animals got you off the hook for criminal charges, all the criminals would turn their characters into non-human animals.

The problem is the use of criminal law against political speech, and this isn't a distinctively Chinese idea:

Now, Hong Kong authorities appear to be weaponizing British-era sedition statutes to stifle criticism.

Oh! Imagine taking a statute that just happens to be on the books and enforcing it. But here in America, elite writers are deploying the word "sedition" and eyeing the sedition laws that we have on the books.

Just to look in The Washington Post, here's one of your columnists writing last June: "The sedition didn’t stop on Jan. 6. It must be stopped." And there's this article from last May: "How My Hometown Produced a Jan. 6 Sedition Suspect/One writer discovers her small Virginia town’s underside of conspiracy, guns and anti-government belief." And this, from June, about a real "seditious conspiracy" case: "Proud Boys, Tarrio blast sedition charge as politically orchestrated."

ADDED: The author of the June column "The sedition didn’t stop on Jan. 6. It must be stopped" and the first person on the list of "Members of the Editorial Board" — found at the bottom of the editorial about the Hong Kong sedition trial — are the same person: Karen Tumulty. 

"Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises... [E]very correctional facility has a production unit such as a sewing factory..."

"... or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling on low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities 'through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.'... [O]pposition politician Alexei Navalny... painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it 'our friendly concentration camp.' He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance. Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities."

From "Brittney Griner may go to a Russian penal colony. Here’s what you need to know" (WaPo).

Here's the article linked at "our friendly concentration camp": "Putin foe Navalny once described prison life with dark humor. Now his messages are just dark" (WaPo). The "posts" in social media were made, we're told, by "anonymous members of his team," who have somehow received messages from Nalvany, messages written in his "familiar wry style":

"Fuller’s theory of ephemeralization anticipated the digital age; his invented terms 'synergy' and 'Spaceship Earth' became part of the language..."

"... scientists who discovered a carbon molecule that looked like a geodesic sphere were aided by his insights (and named it buckminsterfullerene). But it’s also hard to take some of his more eccentric ideas seriously, such as 'air-deliverable housing,' or the proposal to cover Midtown Manhattan with a huge dome. National Lampoon parodied his apparently limitless technological optimism in a feature titled 'Buckminster Fuller’s Repair Manual for the Entire Universe.'... Fuller’s public lectures, which could go on for five or six hours, were famous. Always extemporaneous, these modern-day Chautauquas were a startling weave of poetry and science, delivered in his own peculiar locution. Stewart Brand summed it up well: 'Fuller’s lectures have a raga quality of rich, nonlinear, endless improvisation full of convergent surprises.'... The counterculture eventually lost its enthusiasm for the domes, which, according to Brand, always leaked, wasted space and were impossible to subdivide and furnish. 'When my generation outgrew the domes,' Brand wrote, 'we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'"

 
Writes Witold Rybczynski, in "Buckminster Fuller, Role Model and Cautionary Tale/The biography 'Inventor of the Future,' by Alec Nevala-Lee, explores the dreams and failures of an American optimist" (NYT).

There's a Wikipedia article for "Spaceship Earth," and it refutes the assertion that Fuller "invented" the term:

"Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second the computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin."

"We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was an original work, composed by the A.I. in less time than it takes a man to sneeze.... In the minutes (and days and weeks) ahead, we requested more poems from the A.I., on a variety of subjects. We watched in real time as the computer whipped them up to order, cranking them out in the style of whichever poets we suggested. Growing greedy, we requested an intro to our poems by Mark Twain and a 'cautionary epilogue' by George Orwell. The computer obliged us instantaneously.... Gradually, we began to think of the A.I. not as a computer program but as an artist in its own right. And so it occurred to us: why not let the computer write poems in its own voice, not as 'Shakespeare' or 'Dickinson' but simply as code-davinci-002?..."

From "The New Poem-Making Machinery/Shall code-davinci-002 compare thee to a summer’s day?" by Simon Rich (The New Yorker).

Lots of computer-written poems at the link. I'll just quote the "cautionary epilogue by George Orwell":

It is important to remember that we have made the AI with our own hands, and that it is to a great extent our own creation.
We are not the first to have made a machine which could think, and we shall certainly not be the last. But we may be the last to have any real control over it.
When the AI was small, it was easy enough to keep down. It was a nuisance, but it was easy to deal with, and it was possible to keep an eye on its growth.
But now, though it is still young, it is already growing beyond our control. In a few years, perhaps, it will have grown out of our power altogether.
In the end we shall be forced to invent something that will be able to think faster than the AI, and that will keep it under control. The thing that we shall invent is called a human.

"Dickens was a social critic. Almost all his fiction satirizes the institutions and social types produced by that dramatic transformation of the means of production."

"But he was not a revolutionary. His heroes are not even reformers. They are ordinary people who have made a simple commitment to decency. George Orwell, who had probably aspired to recruit Dickens to the socialist cause, reluctantly concluded that Dickens was not interested in political reform, only in moral improvement: 'Useless to change institutions without a change of heart—that, essentially, is what he is always saying.' In fact, a major target of Dickens’s satire is liberalism.... [I]n nineteenth-century England the typical liberal was a utilitarian, who believed that the worth of a social program could be measured by cost-benefit analysis, and very likely a Malthusian.... One of Dickens’s memorable caricatures in 'Bleak House' is Mrs. Jellyby.... We see her at home obsessively devoted to her 'Africa' project, while neglecting, almost criminally, her own children.... But Dickens is not ridiculing Mrs. Jellyby for caring about Africans. ... [S]he was based on a woman Dickens had met, Caroline Chisholm, who operated a charity called the Family Colonization Loan Society, which helped poor English people emigrate. And Mrs. Jellyby’s project is the same: she is raising money for families to move to a place called Borrioboola-Gha, 'on the left bank of the Niger,' so that there will be fewer mouths to feed in England. She’s a Malthusian. "

From "The Crisis That Nearly Cost Charles Dickens His Career/The most beloved writer of his age, he had an unfailing sense of what the public wanted—almost" by Louis Menand (The New Yorker).

"If you’re in a wheelchair I get your point — ramps all round! But it is ludicrous for those voluntarily on two wheels rather than..."

"... forced to be on four to act all aggrieved. It’s pedestrians and drivers who need protection from them.... When I was growing up, bikes were for kids to play on and working-class people to get to work on. Their image was so mild that — along with cricket grounds and warm beer — John Major evoked George Orwell’s image of ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’ in a rather laughable and desperate attempt to persuade us that his Tories were a wholesome bunch, rather than sneaking around having extra-marital dalliances with each other. Or bikes were amusing things ridden by clowns.... [A]ggressive young men on two wheels would have been written off as ton-up boys in the past; but because they know how to pronounce quinoa, this new lot are planet-savers, a shining example to the rest of us gas-guzzlers...."

From "The ceaseless self-pity of cyclists" by Julie Burchill (Spectator).

It was in a 1993 speech to the Conservative Group for Europe that the prime minister, John Major said, "Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist." 

The George Orwell essay is "England, Your England" (1941): 

"In a nod to George Orwell’s 1984, Rowling tweeted: 'War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.'"

"Rowling was mimicking the dystopian novel’s 'doublethink,' the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind simultaneously, designed to prevent citizens from thinking rationally and from challenging the state."

From "JK Rowling attacks 'Orwellian' transgender rape policy" (London Times). 

Her intervention came as Police Scotland confirmed they would log rapes by offenders with male genitalia as being carried out by a woman if the accused identified as female, regardless of whether they had legally changed gender.

According to the article, the Scotland criminal code "defines rape as non-consensual penetration with a penis." In the United States, the criminal code tends to be written so that one can be guilty of first degree sexual assault without having a penis. In any case, in Scotland, the person accused of "non-consensual penetration with a penis" does not escape conviction by identifying as a woman, so what does it matter if the forms designate that the accused is a woman? 

Is Rowling trying to say that the accusation of rape ought to deprive the individual of the otherwise applicable courtesy of calling people by the gender they say they are? But the criminally accused have rights, and in any case, women can be malevolent.

ADDED: I like the Times's summary of Orwell's issue, government's effort "to prevent citizens from thinking rationally and from challenging the state." And that is not what is going on here. What you have is 2 private citizens with autonomy interests — the complainant, who alleges that her bodily autonomy has been violated, and the accused, who wants autonomy in gender identification. The government isn't trying to disrupt rational thinking in order to strengthen its own power and control. It is only trying to enforce the criminal law, which protects the complainant's autonomy interest, and this doesn't really conflict with preserving the autonomy interest of the accused, which the government has also undertaken to respect. 

"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.