In The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue uses the vivid metaphor of the legend of St. George and the dragon to explain how liberals’ self-conception as the bulwark against evil in the world pushes them to obsess over increasingly trifling things. Speaking of St. George, he writes, “The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested for a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. … But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire. The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life. He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes … As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons — for the big dragons were now harder to come by.”
This week, I found the smallest dragon I have ever seen liberalism breathlessly pursue: An article in the Atlantic by Natan Last has set out to expose “The Hidden Bigotry of Crosswords.”
Last finds something morally telling in resistance to using “BLACK GIRLS ROCK” or “FLAVOR FLAV” as answers. But the reason “black girls rock” makes a bad crossword clue is because it is a weird thing to say. It is not a stock phrase, so the mind does not supply it into a blank. It’s absurd to act as though the only reason an editor might turn it down is disagreement with the content, as though Will Shortz of the New York Times feels strongly that “black girls do not rock.”
In many outlets, it has become so normal to explain the world by finding implicit racism in vocabulary choices that you can forget what an insane and mind-reading way to think this actually is. It amounts to a sort of conspiracy theory about language. Take this quote from American Values Club crossword editor Ben Tausig about why answers such as FLAVOR FLAV really don’t make it in:
“Popular music, where lots of young women and people of color are visible, is regularly dismissed as too ephemeral for a ‘Great Crossword Puzzle.’ … Ephemerality is the code word; exclusion is the result.”
But is it a “code word,” though? Or is that just a totally reasonable explanation of why the career singers at the fusty Metropolitan Opera make for better crossword fodder than the pop stars of the Top 40. Last doesn’t seem concerned with crosswords as a game or puzzle at all. He’s concerned with using syntactically counterintuitive word choices such as “Megan Thee Stallion” in clues to “win converts.”
Apparently, editing these games is now like being a religious missionary or crusader. There is a moral standard we could use to fix the hidden bigotry, though: “Crucially, because codification in reference books and Wikipedia can lag behind popular usage of, say, queer or POC colloquialisms, a quick office poll in Slack — as long as the group being surveyed is diverse — can corroborate what a search-engine algorithm might undercount.”
Is there any feature of modern life so innocuous that some woke writer-editor will not argue it is secretly sinister (and in need of a revolution that leaves woke writer-editors in charge)?
