There were so many players who thanked us for taking on this challenge, and agreed to abide by whatever decision we ultimately came to again, because the game and the community mean so much to so many people. I was also overwhelmed by an outpouring of kindness and understanding. It says so much about the power of our game and our community that even racists - not just the hardcore ones that actively spread their toxic hatred, but the softer ones who stand by rather than get involved, who say “I’m not offended, why should they be?” or “If you can’t accept that the words have no meaning, you’re not welcome,” or “If I’m not offended, why should you be?” - can set aside their deep-seated beliefs to spend time playing a board game with people who do not share those beliefs. Yes, I even love that we have racists in the game.

Somehow, we have all managed to set that all aside when we meet over SCRABBLE boards. We have people of every colour on every side of the debate. We have a lot of racists, and we have a lot of bleeding-heart liberals. I learned a lot about our community in the past weeks.

How can we in this day tell prospective members that they can only play with us if they accept that offensive slurs have no meaning when played on a board? If the youth of SCRABBLE are our future, then why do we haze them by making them memorize lists of offensive words? If a word is so offensive that it can only be referred to by its initial, does that not indicate that it retains its meaning in all contexts? How can we say words have no meaning, when the meanings are there for anyone who holds down their finger on a word in SCRABBLE GO? Should we be wasting time on words when deeds were called for? Does someone who is not Jewish have the right to defend Jews from anti-Semitic language, or someone who is mixed-race like me have any say where racial slurs are concerned? What about dated slurs that might only cause offence to our oldest members? Did we not already deal with all of this in 1994? There were a lot of good and bad arguments on both sides. Some members threatened to leave the association if a single word were removed others threatened to leave the association if any offensive words remained. They ranged from White supremacist screeds to naive expressions of faith in the fundamental goodness of all people. I spent the last weekend poring over more than 1,000 heartfelt responses to our poll on what to do with the problem of offensive slurs in our community’s most important publication, the NASPA Word List.

Gord scrabble word