Here's something in the same vein as the "Jew" thing, but worse:
Apparently in the world of electronic Boggle, queer is verboten: offensive and therefore not a word.
Now, first of all, the word queer—way more than gay—has a pretty valid claim to having lots of use outside of the context of homophobia. As a verb, I don't think it even has any association with anti-gay bigotry—does it? So ruling it out on account of its being a nasty term...well, there's an awful lot of verbal collateral damage, there, innit?
But even as a slur... Seriously, I can't think of another slur that has so successfully been appropriated and repurposed by the relevant oppressed minority. We call that empowerment, right? Do there even exist empowerment stories so victorious?
I mean, in the colleges you don't have "Nigger Studies" or "Cunt Studies": you've got African-American Studies, Women's Studies, and Queer Studies. Queer Studies! Is this because Queer Studies is run by sneering homophobes?
That was a rhetorical question, and the non-rhetorical answer is: no, it's because the word queer has been so thoroughly taken over by the "queers" that Homer Simpson had to whine about it to John Waters's (gay) character on The Simpsons: "That's our word for making fun of you. We need it!"* And that was in 1997!
Homer and a ho... (yes?) ...mo... (yes?)
Electronic Arts, you are a pack of preposterous dingbats. Here's hoping you're a little embarrassed with yourself for this shit—because if not, you are seriously fucking stupid.
* Quoting from memory, may be slightly off.
4 comments:
This helps your argument about the aforementioned Jew thing:
I honestly believed it was the proper noun rule. It still probably is. But now we know they are ruthlessly extracting words that might be seen as pejorative, as well as those that are merely suggestive.
The "queer" thing is as inexcusable as it is obvious.
I would normally preach tolerance for an organization that attempts to harness language without offending anybody, as this isn't an easy thing. It could be they have a policy of "if anyone has a question, don't include it."
It's not "hate" that's emanating from EA, but a particularly irksome type of patronization: "Look, homo-people of San Franciscy and places: we removed the word just to be sure because we care."
Actually, the conversation I imagine went more like "Does anyone know any queers -- I'm sorry: 'Orificially Challenged' -- people they can ask?"
Yeah—shit, I was playing Boggle again just the other day and found some proper noun that it accepted. Fuck, I forget what it was. Anyway, yeah, I'm pretty confident that the Jew thing was misguided anti-anti-Semitism rather than respect for grammatical rules. (Speaking of which, the other day an Eastern European guy I was talking to used the word jew as an adjective: "The Jew newspaper in Slovakia," he said. I was like, "Um, um, language barrier? Um..." You know, didn't want to to jump to judgement.)
I take it he meant it as "that's the [liberal, probably run by Jews] newspaper," as opposed to "that's the Slovakian newspaper for the Jewish community." I've heard before that in E. Europe "Jew" is used the way that "Hollywood" is used by U.S. conservatives, with the same amount of bile, and same McCarthyist connotation.
But you're right: grammatically, that seem proper-ish.
No, he was talking about the one for the Jewish community. But are you suggesting that one would be somehow less anti-Semitic than the other?
Jew as adjective is always anti-Semitic, so far as I can tell, with the possible exception of its being a broken-English vocabulary slip-up.
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