In an effort to raise awareness of social injustices, the woke Left has gotten Scrabble to ban 400 “offensive” terms that refer to racial slurs, sexuality, and gender identity.
“I’ve heard the argument that these are just words, but we believe they have meaning,” Mattel’s global head of games, Ray Adler, said. “We need to modernize it.”
This may seem like a big win for the woke community, but active players of the board game are not pleased.
“It’s hard to find anyone in the Scrabble community in favor of the ban,” Jonathan Maitland, a columnist for the British Spectator and Scrabble player, wrote in response. He added that although competitive players don’t condone these insulting innuendos, they find it pointless to remove them from a vocabulary-based board game. “[P]laying them in a private word game is very different from using them in any other context,” Maitland said.
Words only become actively hurtful if they are intended to be — or perhaps if they are dropped carelessly. Slurs lined up on a wooden board game don’t have the same effect as directly saying them to or aiming them at someone.
“They only become slurs if used with a derogatory purpose or intent or used with a particular tone and context,” Darryl Francis, a co-compiler of the Official Scrabble Words, told the New York Post. “Words in our Scrabble lists should not be removed for PR purposes disguised as promoting some kind of social betterment.”
In order to be accepted by the woke Left, the board game company believes this is its best option. What it fails to realize is that it is going to do absolutely nothing. More players are going to leave the game, and it’s not going to stop people from using certain words in their own homes. The more it becomes petty about these insignificant things, the more credibility will be lost when actually important issues arise.
If banning words that are deemed as “offensive” is the best way to promote equality (oh, sorry, “equity”), clearly, this is the best way to do it. Justice has been served for those triggered when playing the insulting and slur-filled game of Scrabble. If only the players cared.
