Banning ‘offensive’ words from Scrabble is sinister and counterproductive

Can you fix the world by eliminating everything about it you don’t like? Just as history is filled with people who did terrible things for bad reasons, at least according to today’s standards, so too is language bursting at the seams with unpleasant words whose meaning is even worse. What is a contemporary utopian to do? Perhaps one more attempt to begin from scratch will yield a perfectly just world in which inequalities and bad thoughts will be eliminated once and for all. 

At least this is what the current bosses at Scrabble, of all people, believe. A highly secretive list of 400 hundred words – dysphemisms and slurs – has recently been cut from the game’s official list of acceptable words by Mattel. (They own the game in all regions except North America, where Hasbro controls the rights.) The justification for this censorship, according to Ray Adler, their “global head of games”, is the recent Black Lives Matter protests, and the need for Scrabble to be “more culturally relevant”. 

Mattel, however, refuses to release the list, no doubt fearing the entrepreneurial individual who’d promptly print all the words on a T-shirt. I’m sure it’s possible to guess some of them – logophiles, by searching the new official wordlist, have deduced that some of the offensive terms include “goy” and “shiksa”, as well as epithets relating to Pakistani, black and Irish people. Mattel will not yet – let us hope! – be policing games in your own living room, but you never know. For now, XXX-words can still land on triple-word squares.

It is human nature to want to break rules such as these. If you tell someone that something is taboo, it only increases the desire to do or say it. The lawless, scabrous humour of online culture around Trump made it manifestly clear that there will never not be something funny about cocking a snook at humourless people. In all seriousness, though, there is a way in which refusing to infuse insults with the weight of gravity creates levity – precisely of the sort we need to get along together. 

Relatedly, there have been many attempts to “reclaim” slurs as a way of taking away their sting: everything from “slut” (remember “slut walks”?) to “queer” to the n-word has been reclaimed by those to whom it might once have been applied negatively. This is how language moves organically, when it is not being snipped by cynical games manufacturers, Twitter users or the Scottish Government.